Caryl Phillips - The Nature of Blood

I discovered the body. We were packed and ready to go. By now, my parents possessed little of value that had not been hidden, or confiscated, or sold. Just their wedding rings and the necklace. Papa decided to hide these treasures, although I don't believe that he truly expected to reclaim them. However, at the darkest hour of the night, a floorboard had been lifted and carefully replaced. But it was futile. Even I knew this. And was it worth the risk? They had promised that for every item discovered, one hundred would be killed. But these days. One hundred. One thousand. Who was counting? As we stood with a suitcase each, I asked Papa if I might say goodbye to Rosa. Quickly, he said. Quickly. I knocked and then carefully opened the door. I sensed immediately that it was rat poison. Rosa was fully dressed and lying on the bed. Beside her lay her suitcase. She was ready to leave. Then, at the last minute, she couldn't leave. Abandoned. She stared at me from her deep, long-suffering eyes. Then I felt Papa's hand on my shoulder.

'Come, Eva. We have to go.'

In the sky, there shone a solitary morning star. The three of us joined the flood of people pouring down the street towards the train station. A human river of shattered lives, and at eighteen I now understood how cruel life could be. The men who lined our way with their machine guns and angry dogs were unnecessary. All of us knew that at this stage we had little choice. I gazed up at the church clock. It read five o'clock. It was the same clock that I could see from the kitchen window. For almost two years, it had read five o'clock. Here, among these houses which had become our prisons and our tombs, there was no midnight, there were no bells, there was no time. I looked around at the miserable and crumbling buildings, knowing in my heart that those who were hiding would soon be found. And killed. Buildings would be looted, contraband discovered, and whole streets burnt. In time, there would be no evidence that any of us had ever lived here. We never existed. According to Papa, we had followed the advice of our prophets. 'Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.' But it appeared that there would be no end to the indignation. Mama and Papa marched on with grim resolution, and I scurried to keep up with them. My suitcase was heavier than theirs, for it was filled with books, but I was determined that I should carry it myself. I knew that they did not want to talk to me about Rosa. For them, Rosa was already a thing of the past. My eyes were full of tears. Their eyes were firmly trained on the future.

DURING the winter when we sorted through our family belongings, in order to prepare for the move from our four-storey house to the small apartment on the other side of the city, Margot and I came across the old photograph album. The black one with the gilt trim and the specially reinforced edges. Mama kept it on the top shelf in the drawing room, where she imagined that it was out of our reach. Well, it used to be. Mama had forgotten that Margot and I had grown up.

Mama took it from us and then swept her hand along the shelf to make sure that nothing else was up there. Then, instead of stuffing it into a suitcase or a bag, or leaving it on the huge pile of materials whose fate was yet to be decided, she set it down on the drawing-room table and dusted its cover with a cloth. Beneath the skin-like layer of dust, a new object appeared. Mama opened it, and Margot and I gathered at her side, eager to see who or what it might reveal.

There were pictures of people we had never seen before. Old formal portraits, with photographers' names embossed at the bottom of the print. Portraits of old ladies perched on the edge of white wicker chairs, profiles of bearded men, people about whom, when Margot and I asked after them, Mama simply shook her head. They must belong to your Papa. The fact that she could remember neither these people nor their names clearly disturbed her. She looked particularly closely at a yellow-edged photograph of an old man in a suit. He had a doughy face, and an ugly sack of flesh which swelled beneath his chin, yet he insisted on leaning against a cane in a dandyish manner. No, she couldn't place him, either.

In the photographs of Margot as a child, I noticed that she always flirted with the camera. Head thrown back, eyes deliberately bright — she played the coquette.

'Look at you, you show-off,' I said. 'Always looking up at the camera.'

In my photographs, I had a tendency to look down. My head was always lowered, but my eyes looked up, as though I were framing a timid request. Such a contrast in manner.

And then we saw the photographs of Uncle Stephan. He was tall and strong, and he stared confidently into the camera with his soft eyes. Seeing him again sent my mind spinning back six years to when he visited the house. I was about to speak, when I felt the outside of Margot's shoe scuff my ankle, and I knew that I should not comment upon these photographs. Five of them spread across two pages. Uncle Stephan. Always on his own. Always staring directly into the lens of the camera. Always standing.

Uncle Stephan was Papa's only brother. He had journeyed to the British colony of Palestine, for he wanted to defend the new Jewish settlements against attacks from the Arabs, and to prepare the land for large-scale settlement by Jews of all ages and backgrounds. However, his journey was made all the more arduous by the fact that in order to visit this so-called promised land he had to leave behind a young wife and child, and break off from his medical studies. If I think now of Uncle Stephan, I can see a man who, if truth be told, did not know how to handle us children. There was a part of him that was secret and inaccessible, and we could always sense this. Children are able to pick up on such weaknesses and they can be ruthless. As time went by, Uncle Stephan learnt to protect himself against his nieces, although he never held himself distant from either one of us. He had about him a warm detachment, which must have been his way of enduring the pain of his life, but I suppose the truth is that we girls did not really know him. But then again, we did not make much of an effort.

I remember the day when I returned home from school and saw the fancy leather valise in the hallway. Hanging from a peg was a strange khaki-coloured coat. We had a visitor. In the drawing room sat a tall sun-tanned man, delicately holding a cup of coffee between his broad hands. Papa sat opposite him, the two men engaged in an animated conversation. When I walked in, Papa looked up and Uncle Stephan turned to face me.

'Ah, and here she is. Little Eva. Eva, do you remember my brother, Stephan?'

Of course, I didn't. I smiled nervously.

'Uncle Stephan has returned to us from Palestine.'

After dinner that evening, Mama dressed Margot and me in clean white dresses and we were ceremoniously marched into the drawing room. Twice before, Papa had insisted on parading his daughters in this manner, and on both occasions we had cried and begged him not to humiliate us in this way. This time, Mama said, it was different. It was just Uncle, and we could play as little or as much as we wished. As we walked into the cigar-smoke-filled room, Papa cried out with delight.

'Margot! Eva!'

He slapped a knee and jumped to his feet. Then he turned from us to his brother.

'Margot is quite a little pianist. Eva, however, is a newcomer to the violin. You must forgive her mistakes.'

The shock of this betrayal chilled my blood. I looked across at my sister, who, to my dismay, was beaming.

That summer, my parents seized the opportunity of Uncle Stephan's visit to go to the east for a short vacation. Uncle Stephan was left in charge of Margot and me, plus three of our friends. It was understood that we would study in the mornings, and then be free to play for the rest of the day. However, we contrived to turn the mornings into a nightmare for poor Uncle Stephan, who was constantly labouring up the stairs and encouraging us to stop shouting and return to our books. Once he had left, Margot and I would begin again to make up stories about him for our three friends. One day, he might be a pirate who sailed the seas of the world looking for treasure; the next day, an African explorer. We transformed poor Uncle Stephan into anything we thought appropriate, and when we became bored with our games, we simply shouted at each other in order to make him climb the stairs so that we might giggle at him. But he never raised his voice, or left us without a small, if somewhat tired smile.