Saturday 12th November

Letter from [Mechelen] to Judith Mechelen (his sister), February 22, 1941:

My dear Judith,
Greetings from P! The snow is knee-deep, and it’s terrifically cold – colder even than the winters we used to spend in [F-burg] with grandmother and grandfather. The other evening, at dusk, when I walked through the town here to the officer’s mess, the ice was already forming under the yellow lamplight, and I thought of our childhood winters at F-burg. As I walked along, past the lit windows with their drawn curtains, I could hear the people talking within, and their knives and forks clinking and clattering. It was a heartening sound – it sounded like peace and victory, because the war is won in this part of the country. Then our bombers came over, wave upon wave of them – hundreds and hundreds of them, so that the whole of the moonless sky seemed to be filled with the beat and throb of their engines. And even the house windows shook with the sound of them. And if you had been here, you would have heard that sound as the sound of victory, as I did. For we cannot possibly lose.

But, Judith, that is not why I have written to you. I have written to ask you to forget the things I wrote in my previous letter. I was not myself. Please forget what I wrote. It was not correct for me to have written of such things to you. I wrote in a fever, after weeks of strain at the work we do here. I have rested, and I am more myself again.
But enough of such things – I will say no more of it. I trust to your discretion and your faith in our victory.
I will write again soon – please write to me with your news.

With much love,
Your affectionate brother, David.

Monday: Mathilde
Mathilde has been awake since 5 AM, nervous and anxious about the day trip with her class; she was in and out of the toilet incessantly before she left the house, even though she deliberately didn’t drink any tea or coffee after she got up at 5:30. She’d stood at the window in the pre-dawn dark, with the leaves of the trees shivering in the streetlamp light below her window. She’d stared out over the partly-stripped leave canopy, over the empty strips of grass in the bare front garden, over the chain-link fence and the vacant roadway. Then there was another row of houses – all dark – and then the constant amber glow of the city beyond. The first aircraft lights were blinking their way into [airport name]. She looked down at her watch and sighed – only four hours until the trip starts; she wishes it were longer; she wishes that she didn’t have to go at all. Perhaps she could call in sick and avoid the whole thing? She thinks about that for a while, drawn by the liberating idea of escape, but repelled by the idea of letting people down, and by the knowledge that they would judge her and find her wanting in her unprofessional, childish weakness. With one last twisting of her lips, she rejects the idea of cancellation and – having reconciled herself to the unpleasantness and stress to come – strides off towards the bathroom.

When she reached the city centre meeting point after her short bus journey, the idea of the kerbside tourist breakfast in the beautiful late-autumn sunlight proved irresistible. From the bus’s top-deck window she’d been dazzled by the white morning rays of the low sun, and had caught glimpses – down side streets – of rooftops receding in perspective, down towards the [river name], where the orange and grey roof tiles’ colours dimmed, fusing with the distant silver-grey haze over the river. In one momentary view, a column of gnats rose and fell in the light like the fine-sprayed waters of a fountain.

After she got off the bus, she walked along the broad boulevard, enjoying the unaccustomed sights, sounds and smells of the city centre. Where the buildings threw shadows the air was still cool, suffused with traffic-fumes and the cigarette smoke of pedestrians, but where the sunlight cut down the perpendicular chasms of streets, the cars glinted in the light, moving sporadically as the lights changed. No horns honked: the resignation of daily repetition ruled here.

At a pavement café she ordered milky French coffee and Danish pastries at the counter, indicating to the waiter that she would eat outside. Going to the door, feeling her confidence and enjoyment of the world momentarily renewed by the novelty of the morning, she smiled and nodded at three middle-aged men in business suits sitting at a corner table, but they ignored her, not even ceasing their conversation as they looked at him. Miserable sods.

Directly opposite the cafe, seen spasmodically between the moving traffic, was a women’s clothing store, and the bright primary colours and angular cuts of ‘this season’s look’ – apparently – were pleasing to the idle eye in the early morning sun. Less pleasing was the acrid whiff of the waiter’s aftershave when he leaned across to put the large (breakfast) cup and plate full of small pastries on the table. Christ, thought Mathilde, that stuff mustn’t half of stung when he put it on his face. She watched the waiter’s narrow hips and buttocks as he walked back inside: attractive enough in a whip-thin way, but there was something about his five o’clock shadow and over-elaborate sideburns that [repelled] her.

Resting her elbows on the slatted wooden table, she leans over the big cup and blows gently on the froth, enjoying the subtle smells of coffee and grated nutmeg. Sitting here, freed from her usual routine, she feels an incipient sense of focusedness creeping over her, a feeling that she recognises from thee fleeting visits its made to her before – rarely, though, rarely. It often comes over her in the autumn, for some reason, when the light is changing (the sun so much lower in the sky all day) and the year is draining away to the Christmas break; for some people, this is a dead, dreary time – going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark – but she sometimes feels contrarily engaged and interested in the world, for no reason that she can discern. She used to try and analyse what was happening to her mind at these times, but she found that the little sensations and pleasures vanished as soon as she turned her attention on them, too fragile to sustain her gaze. And so she just enjoys the feeling when it steals over her, and tries to let herself soak up as much sensory stimulation and joy as she can when her senses are all focused and precisely tuned to the detailed wavelengths of the world’s colours, textures, fragrances, planes and sounds.

She remembers drinking coffee like this at Uncle Jan and Aunt Mariette’s house, when she stayed with them in the school holidays: these visits were actually quiet rare, but she enjoyed them so much, and received so much stimulation and pleasure while she was there, that they have assumed a privileged and unrepresentative position in her memory pantheon; they are the unattainable, idealised golden age of her childhood. Aunt Mariette used to serve up her mild, milky coffee in ‘bone china’ cups with thin, hard, constricting handles that dug into Mathilde’s soft hands. (She was never sure what ‘bone china’ meant, but she knew that it was an expensive thing, something better than they would ever have at home, and she knew that she had to be careful with it – she could feel its fragility and brittleness when she lifted the full cup, feel the weight of it tugging at her tendons and muscles, and she could feel the weak junction of the handle and the [cup body] when she clinked it down gently into the saucer, hearing the echo in Aunt Mariette’s big, airy kitchen, where there was never anything out of place, and where the radio was never switched on; the clinking sound echoed in that fat silence, with Aunt Mariette gone off somewhere else, and Mathilde not sure what to do next; she always felt shy at Jan and Mariette’s, and didn’t feel that she had permission to move around the house freely – she always felt as if she had to ask permission to leave the room, and felt obliged to tell Mariette where she was going, and ask if that was all right.

Aunt Mariette usually served up a light and airy lemon sponge cake with Mathilde’s coffee, delicately iced, sprinkled with sugar, and drizzled with a lemony syrup; Mathilde remembers the way her sticky, sugary fingers clung to the side of the cup and made her feel that she was going to drag it accidentally and knock it over.

The traffic has cleared a little now: she looks at her watch, and realises that she’ll have to set out soon for the rendezvous with the other teachers and the pupils. (They’ll resent the fact that she’s meeting them in the city, rather than at the school, she knows that: but she also thinks that they owe her something – after all, they just shepherd the kids, whereas she does the research and planning, leads the expedition, and provides the commentary – she does all the real work: they should give her some credit for that, she thinks, but she suspects that they think she’s weak and precious, and that she over-dramatises her own needs and pressures. […]

Across the street, a policeman is talking to a youngish blonde man in a shiny, pale blue suit. The man produces his documents, and the policeman looks meaningfully over the man’s shoulder, down the street. Twenty seconds later a second policeman arrives, and the young man starts speaking louder, and gesticulating. The first policeman speaks into his lapel-mounted radio and moves away, smiling at two veiled [Muslim] women and sharing knowing looks as the women discuss the man in the blue suit. Mathilde’s language skills aren’t strong, but she thinks that the man in the blue suit is speaking an east European [language], littered with guttural (whats?) and Zs.

(c. 1700 words)