Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

“After all, I was only human, too,” the portly woman who was sitting with her friend in the bar on the station of the little suburb kept saying, and pushed the carrots over her plums, so that people shouldn’t notice straight away: she had taken something from her garden in exchange for elastic or knitting wool, and later this was going to be a loss to her husband. Naturally I immediately pricked up my ears, because I was really only sitting there waiting for the ‘Potato Express’ as people call the big food hoarders’ train from out in the country that passes through this station around this time, to clatter past packed so full that a man coming home tired from work can’t fight his way in; that’s to say, although I was really only sitting there in order to doze, nevertheless felt that this was the start of a story I definitely must hear, and I’m passionately fond of stories like that - nothing special, and the more foolish the better - they make you feel less alone.

“But the worst thing was the parrot,” said the portly woman. “Not the green lory we’ve got now, but that lousy Jacob that used to be able to mimic anything straight away. ‘I’m either going to wring that creature’s neck or chuck Elsie out,’ my husband used to say, and he was right - there was no other choice.”

“How long,” asked the friend (the one with the net full of carrots) “was she hiding with you? I thought at the time that you kept changing them round - sometimes with this friend, sometimes with that, but never with any one for longer than one night at a time.”

“Yes, sure. But you know how it is when you’ve arranged something in advance with several people. It’s always the first one who is the mug; the others back out when they see that it’s not so simple.”

“The mug?” the friend asked doubtfully, and rested her elbows on the table. “You can’t say that now, after you almost went to clink through that Elsie. After all, we have to bear in mind today that your husband had just been accepted into the Party, and was senior secretary at the Post Office. You’ve no idea how we all admired you on the quiet for hiding Elsie. A thing like that takes courage!”

“Courage? Well, I don’t know. What could I do when she suddenly stood at my door with her handbag over the star? It was snowing and raining both at the same time, she was wet through and had no hat; she must have run out just as she stood there. ‘Frieda,’ she said, ‘let me in - just for one night. I’ll go away again tomorrow morning, I swear.’ She was so excited, heavens above, and I could already hear my husband stumping along the street with his wooden leg - ‘but only for one night,’ I said quite mechanically, ‘and because we were at school together.’ Of course, I knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t go. My Karl, that kind-hearted fellow, said so the same evening, as he was unhooking my corset and broke the last whalebone in his nervousness. It went snap and he said, ‘She won’t go away now.’”

Both women, as though by mutual agreement, picked up their beer glasses, blew the froth off and took a swig, emptying half the glass - I must say they didn’t drink badly.

“But it was very dangerous in your little gossipy suburb, where everyone knows everyone else,” said the friend with the carrots. “And on top of that, the parrot.”

“No, no. It wasn’t really dangerous at all. No-one who came inside the house would ever have suspected that there might be somebody hiding there who didn’t belong. The people who came to visit us never went beyond the kitchen, or at most into the room beyond; everything else had only just been built on - the verandah, the wash-house, the first floor with the two rooms with sloping ceilings. The whole place was all dark holes and corners; wherever you went you banged into something - the string of onions, for example, that had been hung out to dry, and the washing line. It wasn’t too bad with food either. I had plenty of preserves, the garden produced such a lot. It was only the parrot that went on ‘Elsie’ and again ‘Elsie’ all day long. When the doorbell rang I threw a cloth over the silly bird, then it went quiet at once. My husband, I’ve no need to tell you, is a thoroughly kind-hearted man. But in the end he got quite wild when the parrot kept on saying ‘Elsie’; he learnt anything he happened to overhear, in the twinkling of an eye. Elsie, to give her her due, made every possible effort to be helpful to us both - she peeled potatoes, did the washing-up and never answered the door. But once - I had absent-mindedly switched on the light before the blackout had been put up - the block leader’s wife, that bitch, must have seen it from outside. ‘Oh,’ I said, completely bewildered with fear when she asked me if I had a visitor in the house, ‘that must have been my cousin from Potsdam.’ ‘Oh? Then she must have changed a great deal,’ she said, and looked at me piercingly. ‘Yes, a lot of people are changing in these difficult times, Frau Geheinke,’ I answered. ‘And all cats are grey in the dark.’

“From that moment on, my peace of mind was gone, completely gone, as though it had been blown away. I kept looking at Elsie, and the more I looked at her the more Jewish she appeared to me. Really that was absolute nonsense, because Elsie was slim and delicately built, with brown-blonde hair and a nose as straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler, only a little bit thick at the end. Nevertheless, I can’t help, it was like witchcraft. She noticed it, too. She noticed everything, and asked me, “Do I really look like that?’ ‘What do you mean, like that?’ I replied, like a child who has been caught lying. ‘You know - my nose, for example?’ ‘No, not your nose.’ ‘And my hair?’ ‘Not your hair, either, straight as it is.’ ‘Yes, but what about the curl behind my ear?’ said Elsie, and looked at me despairingly - despairingly and angrily and crazily at the same time - I believe that if she had had a knife in her hand at that moment she would have stabbed herself and me, she was in such a terrible rage. In the end I felt more and more that I not only had a fugitive in my house, but also a madwoman who kept studying herself all the time. When I finally took the mirror away from her, she changed her way of walking and afterwards her speech - her speech grew thick, she lisped, and she became clumsier than anyone I have ever seen: no glass was safe in her hands, every cup spilled over when she filled it, the tablecloth was spattered with spots where she sat. I would have liked to have got rid of her, but I couldn’t have offered her to anyone in her state of mind - not Hilde and not Trude and certainly not Erika, who said that even without the yellow star and the name Sara she could tell who anyone’s grandmother had been at a glance, even in the dark. ‘Really,’ asked Elsie. ‘Entirely without a yellow star? I’ll bet you anything that people would think you were one if you walked along the street with a star - fat and black-haired as you are.’ From that day on, we hated each other. We hated each other when we unintentionally bumped into each other at the stove, and hated each other when we reached for the spoon in the soup tureen at the same time. Even the parrot noticed how we hated one another and took pleasure in biting Elsie’s fingers when she fed him. In the end it got to be too much even for my husband, that kind-hearted fellow, and he said she must leave the house - that was on the same day as the Gestapo must have noticed something. The doorbell rang, an official stood there and asked whether a Jewess named Goldmann was hiding here. At this moment she stepped forward and said in a completely cold voice, yes, she had just slipped through the garden and the back door, because she thought the house was empty. Of course, they took her away at once, and I was questioned a few times, but nothing came out, because Elsie never said a word. But the most amazing thing was the business with the parrot, I can tell you.”

“What about the parrot?” asked the friend, not having understood.

“Well, it was like this. You see, before she gave herself up, Elsie had quickly thrown the tablecloth over him, so he couldn’t speak. Because if he had called out ‘Elsie’ - well, you know, we should all have been done for.”

“Would you have thought of it yourself?” asked the friend, tensely.

“Me? I’m only human and I should have had nothing else in my head but to save my skin. But Elsie - that was no longer the Elsie I had hidden and hated and would have liked to turn out. That was an archangel out of the Bible, and if she had said, ‘That’s her, that fat woman with the black hair! - God in heaven, I’d have gone off with him!”

Well, a statement like that really beats everything, even for a harmless eavesdropper.

“What happened to Jacob?” I asked, finishing off my beer and putting on my rucksack. “Is he still alive, that damned creature?”

“No,” said the fat woman, dumbfounded and reaching for the carrots, to cover up the plums with them. “A Russian cut his throat like a chicken’s, when he went to feed him and Jacob bit his fingers in the nasty way he had.”

“A nasty business, madam,” I said, “but who is there now to exonerate your husband before the Arbitration Court?” (At least, I meant to say ‘exonerate’ but my tongue slipped, damn it, and I said ‘denounce’)