Wednesday 1st – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

[Reorientation after long absence: …Where was I? Can’t remember, really… – at the canalside with Ivan and Michael…they were drifting apart, about to be parted and throw Ivan and Marta back together before the fatal sweep…so I need to do this thing with Ivan and Michael and then cut back to Marta (wherever the hell I left her last… I think she was sitting up at the Summer House in the spring of ’41, hearing Ivan coming…check back…) – this timeline needs to be checked, consolidated and mapped, and synchronised with the one for Mechelen (et al) and the opening section about the ‘Bystander’s Testimony’… So, it’s Ivan and Michael, then Ivan and Marta back together, and then flip back to Mechelen et al and the next stage of the Eastward movement (all those things about the geopolitics and the escalation of the violence and the resentments…)]
One day, late that summer, Ivan and Michael are sitting at their familiar post above the lock, not speaking. They’ve spent a lot of time in silence recently, though they haven’t been spending any less time together: it’s as if they have dropped into a tramlined arrangement of days, where they get up, have breakfast, and – provided it’s not raining – meet at the canal. Sometimes they’ll bring things to play with – tin toy cars, model soldiers, paper and pencils – and other times they’ll just sit, or dangle their feet in the canal and watch the minnows, or walk, or slash at the long grass with sticks, or use the magnifying glass [given to them by the bargee earlier…?] to focus the sun on the shiny carapaces of insects until they combusted with an explosive pop.
Today is a simple ‘sitting in silence’ day. Michael has the bargee’s fold-out map open on his lap. He’s been staring at it for a while, squinting. Lately, Ivan has found that he’s a bit put off by the thought of Michael’s funny eye: it’s become strangely annoying, and he doesn’t want to see it, so he sits on Michael’s other side.
Michael sighs, and Ivan looks at him. Michael says, “Look, I want to show you something,” so Ivan shuffles over to him on his bottom.
“Look,” says Michael, pointing at a spot at the centre right of the map, an inch or so down from the pale blue Baltic. “This is where we are.”
Ivan looks down at the map, and at Michael’s dry, pale brown wrinkled finger crooked above the network of roads and railways converging on the city – a grey smudge against the stylised greens and browns of the contoured countryside. He waits for Michael to fill the silence with something that has meaning, and which might give him a clue about where Michael might take this conversation next: Michael’s speech so far has had a strange feel to it, and hasn’t given away the contours of what will follow. [Ivan has noticed how you can [infer] the shape of most conversations from the first few words, from the tone of the speakers’ voice, and from the speed of speech and the patterns of pauses. He didn’t used to recognise this, but now, all of a sudden this summer, he does.] He waits.
He realises that Michael is crying. Feels himself go cold, feels the pale hairs on his tanned forearms stand up.
Waits again, in silence.
Eventually, Michael says, “My dad showed me this place on the map last night. He said that we won’t be staying much longer. We’re going.”
“Oh,” says Ivan, swallowing a big swallow that has trouble getting past his Adam’s apple. He can tell that this is a new kind of conversation, a scary one that leads to a cold place. A type of conversation that hangs over the edge of an abyss. He doesn’t like it. He wants predictability and certainty. Comfort. “Where are you going, then?”
“Dunno.”
Ivan listens to the water trickling through the sluices in the lock gates, dripping and rippling on the plane of water below. The lock gates are smeared with dirt, crushed weeds and oil, and the grass on the tow path is yellowing into its faded autumn form. Ivan remembers the bargee giving them the map earlier in the year, and thinks of himself and Michael wearing their jumpers when the weather was cooler and wet: it seems a long, long time ago, when he was much younger. It frightens him to try and think about a future where Michael isn’t be a reliable feature of the canalside; makes him feel exposed and small.
At length, Michael says “West. We’ll be going west, I think. Where the money is, like dad says before. Away from the Russians.”
“Where the coal comes from,” says Ivan.
The day, no longer stilled, starts to decline into afternoon.
[…]