A Small Person Far Away. Judith Kerr
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handkerchief from the drawer to spread on her stomach. For some reason this had always cured her.
They had slept under German quilts like this one, not sheets and blankets as in England. The quilts had been covered in cotton cases which buttoned at one end and, to avert some long forgotten, imaginary misfortune, they had always shouted, “Buttons to the bottom!” before they went to sleep. Much later, in the Hamburg hotel after Papa’s death, she had reminded Max of this, but he had not been able to remember anything about it.
That had been the last time they had all been together, she and Max and Mama and Papa – even though Papa was dead. For Papa had left so many notes and messages that for a while it had felt as though he were still with them.
“I told him not to,” Mama had said, as though it were a case of Papa going out without his galoshes on a wet day. She had not wanted Papa to write any farewell notes because suicide was still a crime, and she did not know what would happen if people found out. “As though it were anyone’s business but his own,” she said.
She had left Papa one evening, knowing that after she had gone he would take the pills she had procured for him, and that she would never again see him alive. What had they said to each other that last evening? And Papa – what would he think of all this now? He had wanted so much for Mama to be happy. “You are not to feel like a widow,” he had written in his last note to her. And to Max and herself he had said, “Look after Mama.”
There was a shimmer of light as a draught shifted the curtains. They were made of heavy, woven cloth, and as they moved, the tiny pattern of the weave flowed and changed into different combinations of verticals and horizontals. She followed them with her eyes, while vague, disconnected images floated through her mind: Papa in Paris, on the balcony of the poky furnished flat where they had lived for two years, saying, “You can see the Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower!” Meeting Papa in the street on her way home from school. London? No, Paris, the Rue Lauriston where later, during the war, the Germans had had their Gestapo headquarters. Papa’s lips moving, oblivious of passers-by, shaping words and phrases, and smiling suddenly at the sight of her.
The boarding house in Bloomsbury on a hot, sunny day. Finding Mama and Papa on a tin roof outside an open window, Papa on a straight-backed chair, Mama spread out on an old rug. “We’re sunbathing,” said Papa with his gentle, ironic smile, but specks of London soot were drifting down from the sky, blackening everything they touched. “One can’t even sunbathe any more,” said Mama, and the bits of soot settled on Mama and Papa and made little black marks on their clothes, their hands and their faces. They got mixed up with the pattern on the curtains, and still Mama and Papa sat there with the soot drifting down, and Anna too was drifting – drifting and falling. “The most important thing about writing,” said Richard, but the plane was landing and the engines made too much noise for her to hear what was so important, and Papa was coming to meet her along the runway. “Papa,” she said aloud, and found herself in the strange bed, unsure for a moment whether she had been asleep or not.
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