Saturday 4th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

Marta wipes the tears out of her eyes and smoothes them from her cheeks. Sniffs back hard, shakes her head. Sees the bright sunlight become dazzling through the moist filter of her eyelashes, and holds her eyes there, half-shut, moving her head slowly to catch the sun. Marvels at the intensity of the light.
She hears Ivan walk to her side, and can hear his breathing, quickened from his run.
She opens her eyes and turns towards where he’s standing between her and the sky, and looks up at his blondish fringe hanging down, unevenly cut with a pair of dress-maker’s scissors. (She remembers the cold weight of them against her own forehead, and some maid’s unsteady hand tracking them across her fringe.)
“Hello, dear,” she says to Ivan, reaching out her hand. She can’t believe how happy she is to see him.
He sits down next to her, still holding her hand. Despite the sun, he feels strangely cold. They sit in silence for a while, happy with this contact: the comfortable familiarity and love of the sibling’s fingers entwined with your own.
Ivan says, “Why doesn’t Papa love Mama any more? I don’t understand why he doesn’t.”
“I don’t know,” says Marta, “Really I don’t.”
Last night, after dinner, she’d heard Mama and Papa raising their voices to each other again. She had wanted it to stop, and she had wanted to run away to her own room, but instead she had stayed in the little sitting room next to the dining room, listening to Mama and Papa through the open double door that provided the sitting room’s only light.
Papa had finished his cheese, and was drinking brandy from the bowl of an enormous glass. His face had already had that unhealthy purple-red flush when Marta had got down from the table half an hour ago. Since then she’d been curled up on the two-seat sofa in the adjacent room, hugging her knees, with her feet tucked up inside her dress, the hem anchored with her feet: a self-contained little tent. Since she asked to leave the table, Mama and Papa haven’t really said anything: there’s just been the sound of cutlery on china, and the chink of glass on glass.
Now, though, she can tell that Papa is angry about something. He rarely swears – and usually only in the factory – but he’s using bad words tonight. This frightens Marta, making her think that her Papa is moving off into some strange place that she doesn’t recognise. She wants Mama and Papa to be reliable, not unpredictable: there’s enough in her emotional life and her school environment that can’t be relied on at the moment.
She thinks about how Papa is when he’s sitting in his study (which overlooks the big, white-gravelled drive at the front of the villa. She likes it when he sits in his armchair there, with the door open and the gramophone playing his music, with the sunlight bright on the white-painted window frames, and light reflecting off the gravel onto the delicately-patterned plaster ceiling. Her best times there have been when Papa invites her in: sometimes he’ll beckon her over to sit on his knees, and he’ll cuddle her while the music plays; she’ll smell the smells of his hair oil and the stiff, musty smell of his tweedy jacket, and she’ll feel the strength and hardness of his arms and chest through the fabric of his clothes. This strength is strange, given the flabbiness of his belly and his triple chin, but it is undeniable: his arms can grip like steel hoops, and any child’s escape attempts are futile.