[33] The sun shines on the living and the dead

We’re at grandfather’s table on a Sunday afternoon with Johnny napping in a padded cabbage crate by the stove and the remains of lunch between us, soup plates and half a rye loaf and a half-emptied carton of plum squares from the Sun Room – and a pile of books on the floor beside us. My Sunday headache is almost gone. Grandfather has lived here alone for the ten years since Mrs Aaronson Senior died, except for the year that Emma and I lived in the storeroom above him when we were really broke.

In a room like this, you see where men put things when no women are near. Basically, we stack things, and Emma doesn’t worry me about it any more. She can’t see the order, but I can. I used to tease her, early days (till I learned to stop – no teasing is unspoken rule number two, which follows no stalking out), about how she kept house for her grandfather in a way she’s never done between us. The sweeping, and dusting, and dishwashing, and the stack shifting. She looked like herself with a hammer and nails or a saw when we were rebuilding the cottage, wearing leather gloves to protect her hands, and she dug and topsoiled the garden up there without much help from me. It’s housework that doesn’t suit her look – it’s like watching a dog dance, when she turns to that theme – but in grandfather’s rooms she got deft at it. She must have been teaching herself to show when she cared about someone else, looking for the tools to do something in return for people. Even this moment, I see her dart her eyes around the room at what she wishes she had the energy to do, because this isn’t one of her better new days. And I see grandfather smiling to himself at what he knows she’s thinking. He gets up to pour her another mug of tea so that she’ll stay in her chair while she drinks it.

His two rooms always need a lantern. A long wall of bookshelves. A little box capped with a block of ice. A table, three chairs. Drawings of Emma on the walls from years past, and the recent one of the two of us with Johnny. A bed behind a curtain, a coat on a hook. The room smells of the street, of stables and run-off, of snow out the window, of the cabbages he retails from the front room and backyard. Through his window he sees other windows. If he craned his head he would see the gap in the houses where the canal runs, and our apartment’s quay windows. It’s fifteen hundred metres from this room to them, but our apartment is the Inner World, one cell on the edge of the empire’s beehive, and this is the Isle of Jews, where most people are poor so no one looks up much and would have no one to wave to if they did.

I’m holding a blue chalk, not a blue I like to use much. Not nature’s blue, not the one you see when you hold a robin’s egg to the light or go picking alpine flowers. It’s the favourite colour for plenty of people, but not me, no. There is a stack of ivory drawing paper at my right elbow, a pile of chalks and coloured pencils above the top of the sheet. Everything one blue or another.

‘Is it this one, Emma?’ grandfather asks. He’s opened yet another nature book to a photograph of a wolf. A stack of books from the island library is forming at his elbow, multiple pages marked with paper slips. Animals of the Royal Empire. A Child’s Book of Dogs. A Natural History of the Carpathians.

‘Start with that one,’ Emma tells me. All the plates in this book are black-and-white.

I pick up a chalk and do what I do – a solid white background, a near perfect circle, a hole in the middle that I touch with black, leaving a dot of white as a catchlight.

‘Paler,’ she says.

I take a paler chalk and turn the sheet over and do the same thing.

‘Paler still.’

‘Are you sure,’ her grandfather asks. ‘No one’s eyes can be – ’

Her answer catches in her throat, enough to stop my hand. She wants to describe that guy’s eyes to us, so here we all are.

‘Even paler,’ she says. ‘So pale you can see the capillaries running towards the centre. But give it a darker ring around the irises.’

‘Is he looking up or down?’ I ask.

‘Up, with his chin tucked a little. And he’s only glancing up but he’s usually looking down.’

‘Emma, for God’s sake, that’s psychology.’

‘So? You’ve got a psyche. I saw.’

‘Why don’t I just go look at him?’

Because she’s made me promise not to. Right as soon as I got back from Rosemeyr’s with the stretchers, she made me do that. So instead we’re flailing with her memory.

Grandfather pats my elbow and shows me another wolf drawing.

‘No, not like that,’ she says. ‘Start over.’

She needs this so much. You love a woman, you bow to these moments, the way she would tolerate me if she ever had to. I take a new sheet and just touch the paper with my palest blue chalk, then a turquoise: What if I do that? After hesitating, she nods. Her forehead frowns at what those eyes mean to her, her fingerprints pressed into her temples. Softly, with a hard pencil, I draw two lines for eyebrows.

‘Less space above the irises,’ she says, ‘and they’re straighter than that. Thicker towards the middle.’

I get the eyebrows right the first try – a brown that is almost black. But the eyes? The room has the solemnity of an operating theatre. After half an hour of this, she and her grandfather are breathing in unison. Just the eyes, she keeps telling me. The eyes she thought she had seen long ago and had tried so long to remember as bad dreams. What is ‘scary blue’? She tells me to start over again. This time, to distract her, I draw her mother’s eyes, but I make them blue.

‘I don’t like those, but they don’t scare me. Try again.’

‘Emma, you know how hard it is for me to work like this. Tell me go and find the guy.’

‘Children,’ grandfather says. ‘Stop. Paul, you won’t be able to do this. Emma, you have to stop asking him. This man, did he hate our kind? When he looked at you, was a Jew all he saw? I thought so. Then how can you expect Paul to know eyes like that? Paul, you could do it from life, but from your imagination? No. That’s a fear you can never know, so put the chalks down. Emma, hold Johnny for a while. Tell yourself he doesn’t know any of that yet. Then be happy for a minute.’

While he’s speaking, I’m giving it one more try. Eyes that lure you onto rocks and feed on inchoate screams. Instead of showing it to Emma, I show it to her grandfather, who stares long and says, ‘A Jew hater, another one, trying to make us to apologize for what the world has done to them – to the world, Paul. They want to hear the lie from us that we’re the guilty ones. You caught the rage, but you missed the target. Gentiles never have to forgive themselves, it’s Jews who always need to do that. I love you more than my own son, Paul, but you’re never going to imagine what it’s like to be thought about like that.’