Totentanz

When the Stranger came for her again, it was Thursday in the early afternoon and Mrs. Green was dreaming of roses. The women used to bring them from the countryside, bundle them up to sell by the fistful or parcel them out in ones and twos for poor lovers suddenly moved to part with a coin. Yellow roses, the rich gold of saffron buns and evening sunlight on water. The soft, delicious scent enveloping her senses, petals stroking the nub of her nose—a distant trill, like some strange bird in the distant forest—the glimpsed profile of her mother’s face—oh, that’s the bell—but come back, I haven’t seen you in so long—the bell again, pulling her back into the waking world, a new-old, cold country and a new millennium.

Whoever it was rang the bell again for good measure and then stopped, presumably waiting outside. Mrs. Green was startled but not surprised to find herself on the little downstairs sofa, where she had drifted off after lunch, the ready meal half-eaten in front of her on an enamel tray commemorating the Royal Wedding. She had been opening her post, nothing very exciting except for an early birthday card from one of her grandchildren who had wished her a happy ninety-fifth birthday, though this year she would in fact be turning ninety-six. She could no longer remember what age she had put on which forms and which lies she had told to whom and supposed it no longer mattered much to anyone except her, anyway. She gripped the edge of the sofa, trying to raise herself, but she didn’t have enough strength in her arms. It was a shame they didn’t make special sofas for old people, comfortable enough to sink into but with a convenient bar like the one her son Joszef had insisted she put in the bathroom, which she had resisted strenuously and then immediately found useful. He had one himself now, he told her—and a pin in his left hip to match hers, always the bad side for some reason.

She got hold of her stick and braced the rubber tip against the treacherous floor, levering herself upright. It wasn’t one of Joy’s days to visit her and so the wooden boards were dusty and the big curtains at the front were still drawn. There was a special gizmo to wind them but you had to be able to reach up and keep your arms above your head so she just left it, as Joy had forbidden her from climbing onto any more chairs after last time. It was all so humiliating: she now had to ask a strange woman permission to open the curtains in her own home. She, who despite all the odds. . . but Mrs. Green didn’t want to think about that right now. She made her way to the door and opened it, but no one was there. Probably got fed up and left, she shouldn’t wonder. No note, either.

It was a crisp autumn day, the maples in her neighbours’ gardens were aflame red and orange and the air felt clear, with just a little water in it. Why shouldn’t she go out? Taking her handbag off the peg in the hall, she set off in her house shoes, which looked respectable enough with their closed toes and could be scrubbed thoroughly later. It occurred to Mrs. Green that she could just get on the bus and go as far as she could into the city. There was no one to tell her she couldn’t. She supposed the buses most likely didn’t travel in a loop anymore, but perhaps she could go all the way to the end of the line and back. She could go to the National Portrait Gallery, or Harry’s Deli (before she remembered it had closed) or to visit Tibor in the Willesden Cemetery. The long pavement stretched downhill, enticing her onto the rather misleadingly named High Road.

She realised she had come out without a jacket or a hat or an apple for her bag, but perhaps that would be all right. Her knees already hurt and she wished she’d brought the walker instead of the cane, but it was such an unsightly thing, it belonged in a hospital, really. Mr. Fischer at number ten was doing something with a leaf blower in the front garden and waved to her, looking concerned. She waved back with her free hand but didn’t wait to talk to him, that machine made such a racket. One of the bored-looking Shomrim boys employed to keep the neighbourhood safe whizzed past her on a quad bike on what must be his hundredth round of the day.

Mrs. Green reached the end of the road and felt about in her bag for some coins, though she wasn’t sure what would be enough. Whenever she needed to go somewhere, Joszef or one of her daughters drove her, or Joy called a special service. She looked for a machine to buy herself a ticket but there was nothing on either side of the bus stop, nor any sign of one further up the High Road. Perhaps they sold them on the bus. A lumbering 460 stopped beside the shelter and seemed to be lowering itself to let her on more easily, dirty air rushing out with an audible hiss.

‘How much for a ticket, please?’

‘We don’t take cash anymore, Mrs. Sorry, it’s not allowed.’

Mrs. Green had a second look in her handbag for a debit card, but she must have left it in the fruit bowl, it was easier to find there.

‘Do you have a Freedom Pass?’ he asked. She wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly, the man’s accent and the noise from the road outside made it almost impossible to make out what he was trying to tell her.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.’

‘You know, the card for older people like yourself.’

‘No, I don’t believe I do.’

He sighed. ‘Is it an emergency? I can let you on if it’s an emergency.’

‘No, I just wanted to go Willesden Green.’

The radio crackled with incomprehensible noise. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to be getting on now. Have you got someone who can help you with forms and that?’

She nodded glumly and got off the bus. She’d had a car, a little red Mini, which she loved. But her daughter Sara had taken it off her after she’d caught Mrs. Green trying to make a quick trip without going back into the house to fetch her glasses. She’d smacked all three of her children on the backs of the legs when they’d been young for stealing sweets or causing a ruckus and now here she was having her own things confiscated like a naughty schoolgirl. She felt suddenly very tired.

The bakery on the opposite side of the road looked terribly inviting, with a great brightly lit counter filled with loaves and bagels and a few wooden tables and chairs near the window in front. The road was wide and filled with cars, lorries, and determined-looking cyclists who appeared out of nowhere to puff their way up the hill, their shiny helmets and tight lycra making them resemble members of another species entirely. She crossed slowly, the light turning back to red before she could make it to the other side. There was a bit of honking, but none of the cyclists sped past and knocked her down, so she counted that as a success. The bakery was warm and bright. She bought a slice of poppyseed cake and a cup of tea, with a medium babka wrapped in brown paper for later—Joy would be so surprised and would probably scold her, but it was worth it. She sat at a free spot next to a Hasidic mother and two small boys dangling little paper cranes on strings over the chubby baby in her arms, who seemed alternately delighted and determined to catch the teasing birds, gurgling with pleasure at the game.

The smell of warm yeast and sugar revived more of her lunchtime dream, the poppyseed conjuring up cobblestones, woodsmoke, and the feeling of washing her face with cold water on winter mornings before it was even light. She wished she had been able to keep a photograph of her mother, but she didn’t know whether there had ever been such a thing in her possession. There probably was one somewhere, locked in an archive or an institution, but not the kind she would ever wish to see. A well-meaning doctor had asked Jozsef in middle age which illnesses his grandparents had suffered from, trying to rule out risk factors, he said, and had seemed surprised when Jozsef could not begin to answer him.

The baby had begun to cry and one of the little boys was standing looking abashed at having teased too hard. It was time to leave. Mrs. Green made it back over the road without incident and around the corner to the beginning of the long road home. What had been a pleasant downward slope on her journey out was now an intimidating climb, the grey slabs stretching unpleasantly away into the distance and her front door almost out of sight. She sighed and put one foot in front of the other, grateful now that Joy had insisted upon sticking orthopaedic cushions into every pair of shoes she owned. Slowly, very slowly, Mrs. Green made her way up the incline, pausing every few houses to rest against a pillar, cane braced under her armpit for extra support, clutching the babka in her other hand. The sun shone very brightly and the world felt vast and bewildering, there was so much of it and it was so hard to traverse, even now. Images from the evening news of the poor souls trekking through the Sahara or the Panamanian jungle trying to get away from horrors at home swam before her eyes and she scolded herself.

Mrs. Green shuffled onwards, her shoulder aching from the effort of pressing down on the cane with every step, with shooting pains running up her ankles. How could she possibly be so out of breath already? She looked up to inhale deeply and saw the go-kart whizzing down the hill again, felt a sharp jolt, and fell heavily, throwing out both hands to stop herself landing heavily on her bad hip. Winded and embarrassed, she tried to peel herself off the floor. She heard the Shomrim go-kart stop nearby.

‘Hello? Hello, lady?’

An olive-skinned boy who could not have been more than twenty-two was standing over her, looking worried. The babka had slipped out of her grasp, to land directly and unsalvageably on the pavement, broken in two with crumbs scattered around and ahead of her like snow.

‘Hello, lady?’

‘I’m all right really, it will just be a moment.’

He continued to look worried and took a red box out of the go-kart, which presumably contained first aid. Mrs. Green peered up the street to see whether her neighbours were out in their gardens. This was too much, really.

‘Don’t worry about that, if you could just give me a hand.’

‘Eh sorry, my English is. . .’

She stretched out a hand and instead of taking it, he scooped up her body to stand her on her feet, before realising he also needed to get her cane so he propped her awkwardly against the wall. He smelled strongly of men’s deodorant and something slightly spicy. The boy snatched up the cane and handed it back to her. She took it uncertainly and made to step forward, but her wobbly gait clearly left him unconvinced.

‘With me, in car.’

He pointed to the passenger side of the go-kart and she assented. He picked her up again and deposited her in the small space, carefully tucking her knees into the footwell before closing the door. She could hear the radio clipped to his chest burbling with incomprehensible static, but he ignored it and drove them up the street, comically quickly by comparison to her attempt on foot. When he removed her from the seat, he insisted on depositing her by her front door, for which she was suddenly grateful. Not even Tibor had carried her over the threshold on their wedding day so it would have felt wrong for this unknown man to do so. They could carry her out feet first when she was dead, as she had often said to her exasperated children before they found Joy to come and check on her.

He made a gesture to indicate unlocking the door and she pointed to the flowerpot filled with purple-blue plumbago, from which he pulled her emergency keys. He held them up to examine the silver and blue hamsa dangling from the keyring and asked, ‘G’veret, at m’daberet ivrit?’

‘I don’t understand, sorry.’

He looked at her and the keys again and asked something else she didn’t understand. Mrs. Green realised what he was trying to do and shook her head. ‘Du redst yiddish?’

He laughed and said, ‘No Yiddish.’ She unlocked the front door shakily and, because he was still there, gestured for him to follow her. He might as well have some water. The boy insisted on looking at her hands. He made her run them under the tap to get the grit out and he put a disinfecting spray on them from a red case strapped to his belt. It stung unpleasantly but faded as he began winding gauze around her palm. He seemed very interested in looking at the pictures of her children and grandchildren on top of the piano and on the bookshelves. She bitterly regretted the loss of the babka as the only other thing she had in the house suitable for guests were plain digestive biscuits of an indeterminate age.

She gestured to the teapot on the sideboard and he shook his head.

‘Coffee?’

She rootled about in the cupboards but the Nescafé had transformed into a solid block and she shoved it quickly back out of sight, embarrassed.

‘Sorry, no coffee.’

He seemed like he was about to leave and, suddenly not wanting him to go, Mrs. Green cast her mind back a long, long way, to try a Russian sentence on the boy, and it worked.

‘Why do you speak Russian?’ he asked her in Russian. ‘You are English, yes?’

‘I grew up in Poland, it was a common language. Why do you speak Russian?’ she asked him in Russian and their conversation continued in this language.

‘I learnt it to talk to my girlfriend’s family, they are from Azerbaijan. Where in Poland are you from?’

She told him and he got out his phone. Mrs. Green could not work out why until she realised he was looking at a map.

‘Here?’ He made that thumb-and-forefinger gesture that magnified the right area of screen.

‘I think so, I never went back.’

‘I thought maybe you are from the same place as my grandfather, but it’s not close.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘Yes, he is in Ashkelon, with my parents and my sister.’

The phone began to ring aggressively and the boy answered it with a few short sentences in Hebrew before hanging up. He slid it back into his pocket.

‘Okay, I have to go now,’ he said to her in Russian. ‘I am Ori. If you fall over again, please call us, okay? No lying in the road, it’s not good.’

He took a pen from the bowl on the table and wrote down a telephone number on the top of the newspaper splayed open to the Comment section. ‘One last thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I saw someone waiting by your house this morning.’

‘Yes, I was asleep. I heard the doorbell, but they left.’

‘Maybe don’t answer.’

Ori’s phone began to ring again and he hurried out of the door, saying something that sounded like ‘Riga, Riga,’ though she supposed he could not possibly have been referring to the Latvian capital.

Mrs. Green boiled the kettle again, taking down her favourite teal mug which showed two tortoiseshell kittens playing with a ball of yarn. She knew she shouldn’t have more caffeine at this hour but supposed it hardly mattered anyway; she was too filled with thoughts and impressions from her brief, forbidden sojourn out into the world.

Her neighbours’ gardens had been filled with fronded ornamental cabbages and bright winter pansies in terracotta pots and the scent of the bay tree opposite her house had wafted down the road, accompanying her a little way with the breeze. The baby’s cheeks had been so round she’d wanted to pinch one but suspected that sort of thing probably wasn’t allowed any more. She decided Ori was a nice young man, if rather abrupt, then wondered whether Mr. Fischer would tell Jozsef she’d been out. She pored over the newspaper but found it all dispiriting and remote, so turned to the television instead. Mrs. Green sometimes still found herself making comments for Tibor’s amusement, though in their last year together he had only been able to speak broken Hungarian and no one she knew could translate.

It was still light outside when she went upstairs to bed, but she had woken up that morning tired and was tireder still now. The stack of thrillers which Joy had brought from the library had begun to rather annoy her, no one numbered series any more and they were so formulaic that sometimes she would begin a new novel only to realise halfway through that she’d already read it. Mrs. Green wondered whether she would do better to read only standalones in order to not miss out the conclusion by predeceasing the authors, but turned her mind to pleasanter topics. Her birthday party was this coming weekend and most of her grandchildren had already said they would come. If the weather was up to it, they might even sit in the garden for cake and champagne, with music playing from the kitchen radio. Sara would grumble about Mrs. Green’s health but she could not deny an old woman half a flute on her own birthday and Mrs. Green knew it. Vexing her abstemious daughter was one of her few remaining great pleasures.

The next morning she was awoken at eight sharp by the ringing of the doorbell and, thinking Joy must have forgotten her keys again, put on her dressing gown and hoiked herself along the rail in the corridor. She descended on the stairlift, calling out to Joy to hang on just a minute. A shadow was visible through the frosted glass of the front door, much taller than Joy, and with trepidation Mrs. Green considered simply returning to bed until whoever it was went away. But they had already heard her footsteps on the stairs. The bell rang again and she reluctantly answered it.

‘Am I speaking with Mrs. Green, please?’

The Stranger was grey-haired and grey-faced, of indeterminate age and utterly unremarkable-looking excerpt for a long black coat, too heavy for the spring weather. He cleared his throat, clearly expecting a reply.

‘Yes, that’s me. Can I ask what this is about? Are you from the Council?’

‘I’ve got some papers you need to sign, I won’t be a minute.’

‘Oh dear, I haven’t got my glasses with me, you’d better come in.’

She turned and led him into the kitchen, knotting the cord of her dressing gown to make sure it didn’t come open and embarrass her. His steps on the floorboards were so light that had she not let him in, she would have assumed no one was there.

‘If you could just sign these for me, I’ll be on my way.’

‘What is this about, please?’

‘I’ll give you a minute to read them.’ He pushed the papers towards her on the clipboard, the print incredibly small. She tried to focus in on the key sections, but the text was very confusing. It was as if the paragraphs slid over one another and slithered out of sight just as she was getting to the end of a clause; she could hardly make out anything.

‘I need my specs for this, can you see them anywhere?’

She looked about the dusty kitchen and so did the Stranger, scanning the counters and shelves.

‘Here you go, Ma’am,’ he said and handed her a cherry-red pair.

‘Oh no, I’m afraid those are my far-away glasses, I need my reading glasses for up close.’

Very slowly, she wandered off into the front room and the Stranger strode after her, as she checked behind cushions and under paperbacks until the right pair emerged.

‘Much better, but still too small I’m afraid.’

He said rather testily, ‘Can’t you just sign it? The fine print really isn’t very important, nothing you haven’t seen before.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, but I was told never to sign anything I haven’t read fully and over the years that’s proven good advice. I’ll need my magnifying glass, as well, for this.’

The Stranger eventually located the missing object in the fruit bowl and passed it over with an ill grace.

‘What department are you from again, I don’t think I caught it the first time?’

‘Population Records Department. It’s just a gathering exercise. Really, I do need to expedite this, there are a lot of other people I need to get to.’

Even at a larger size, the text made little more sense than it had before. She had the sense that the words were blurring and fading and shifting even as she looked at them.

‘I think I need the lamp for this.’

He let out an audible sigh. She flicked on the switch of the big metal desk lamp that rested on the kitchen island, but it didn’t work. She tried a few more times, but the switch was gummy with dust and oils and sometimes got stuck. It turned on for a moment before she heard a sharp crack above her head and all the lights fused. The sun had barely risen and the kitchen got scarcely any light even in summer. 

‘Oh, for goodness sake, now I’m just sitting in the dark. No one ever comes to visit me, the house is in such a state! I’m sorry, I wasn’t prepared for this. You don’t mind, do you?’

The Stranger opened and closed his mouth several times. Eventually he said, ‘Do you have a fuse box?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think I can reach it anymore, I’d need a ladder.’

‘Where is it?’ he asked, irritably.

‘In the hall, back there, in the white box, it ought to show you which switch.’

He departed to fix it, muttering under his breath. Moments later, the overhead lights returned. Mrs. Green began testing biros on the same sheet of old newspaper that Ori had written his number on the day before.

‘None of these work, do you have a pen?’

He handed her a sleek black fountain pen with a silver clip.

‘Oh, it’s so lovely, I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Really, it’s quite all right.’  His grey mouth was set in a straight line.

She took the pen. It felt cold in her hand and incredibly heavy, as if it were made from some sort of stone. Just as she was about to uncap it, she giggled and said, ‘Oh dear. I’m afraid I have to be excused for a moment. . . at my time of life, you really can’t wait, you know.’

The Stranger gestured exasperatedly for her to go. ‘The thing is, I think I might need your help, in case I fall over in there. It can get a bit messy. You’re such a nice young man, I don’t think you mind, do you?’

‘Very well, I’ll take you in and wait outside in case anything untoward happens.’

‘Oh, I need you to stay, sometimes I can’t wipe properly, you see.’ She watched him blench, looking even greyer than he already was.

He looked down at his watch and made a show of being concerned by what he read there, then snapped his head up and said, ‘I’m afraid I must be going! Thank you for your time, Mrs. Green, but I really have to leave now. Can’t sit around all day shooting the breeze, you know.’

‘All right, let me see you to the door, if you could just hand me my walker from over there.’

‘No really, it’s fine, I’ll just be off! Have a good day now!’

He was out of his chair and moments later she heard the door close. By the time Mrs. Green had made it to the front room and pulled back a section of curtain, he was gone.

Mrs. Green laughed softly under her breath. The Stranger had not recognised her, though she had met him before in the town where she grew up, and several times again while hiding in the forest with her brothers in the Resistance, and once more on the boat to England.

 She put an old favourite on the CD player and counted her birthday cards again.