Where would Peter Henning be now? Kate sat by the window of her bus, thinking how odd it was that her memory of that afternoon should be so vivid. Afterwards, they had gone to the bar of Hotel Esplanade, where she thought Oscar might be, and he was. They had spent the evening there, with Peter and Oscar in animated conversation. Athletes and results were hotly debated in the smoke-filled bar, which was crowded with foreigners, Olympic officials, and reporters. Berlin had never felt freer or more exuberant. Peter had insisted on dropping them off at home, Fasanenstrasse being too far away for them to walk. He had lowered the canvas hood of the car; it was a warm evening. Besides, the rain had stopped, he said, flashing her a smile. Upon arrival he held the car door open for her and helped her alight, squeezed her hand briefly, saying he had enjoyed their outing immensely and would never forget it. Oscar had joined them as they stood there, putting one arm around her and the other around Peter. An August evening as never before. She would not forget it either.
The bus pulled up, she had to get off.
Peter had left the hospital a few months later. Kate had received a letter from him explaining his motives in the vaguest of terms. She had found it very strange, they had made such a good team in the operating theatre. Had he fled, was he Jewish by any chance? Was it something to do with her? That was the last she had heard of him. Shortly after that she had resigned as well.
In the hall of the Richmond she found herself in a crush of people. Not far away a bomb had exploded, one of those that went off by accident, days or weeks after being dropped. By accident indeed, for today there were dozens of wounded and several dead. A frequent occurrence, but no less harrowing for that. There were dormant bombs all over the city.
Kate took the stairs to her wing. She paused a moment before entering the ward, listening to the moans of the wounded down in the hall. It was not for her to offer first aid as she was no longer a nurse, and would not even be permitted to help. Nobody knew that she had worked as a theatre assistant in Berlin, and she had preferred to keep things that way. In a few days’ time some of those wounded would turn up in her ward anyway: more cases for the subtle affairs department. Kate wanted to deny it, but failed: now that Matteous had been discharged, the hospital seemed to have lost its spirit. She had a sense of vacancy, in a ward brimming with need. The cubicle she had visited daily for so many months had a new occupant, equally injured and equally in need of assistance. So yes, she would step in, but she was already looking forward to the afternoon, when she would teach Matteous to write.
He would be arriving in a hour, armed with the tools for the letter he would write one day: copybook, pen, and primer. They had been practising every afternoon for a whole week. The alphabet had been recited and painstakingly written out. Kate had pronounced each letter in a clear, slow voice, over and over again. Matteous wanted to write in English, the language he had first heard in the mines of Élisabethville. She had no idea how to teach somebody to read and write. She could not remember how she had been taught herself. You had a picture alphabet, you had Jack and Jill going up the hill – how on earth did these things go? You were a sponge absorbing words which you then squeezed out onto the page; five or six years old, the magical age of seeing letters turn into words. Had there been any particular method to it? She did not know, she would simply go about teaching Matteous the basics of English as best she could.
The small table by the window was their practice field. They sat side by side for many a long hour, with Matteous hunched over a word taking shape under his pen, even as it fell apart again. They repeated the sounds countless times, looking to see how they fluttered down onto the paper. Kate gave the example and Matteous followed suit with ink-stained fingers. He became agitated, repeatedly getting stalled halfway through what he wanted to say, the simplest of statements coming out garbled. Coherence was what was lacking. There were all those letters strung into words, which, taken together, did not make sense. It drove Matteous to distraction. He would rather be trudging through the forest, going down the mines, even marching through the savannah with a gun over his shoulder – anything was better than this blind grappling with script. Kate understood. She too found it hard to stay the course. But she had given him her word, and would not go back on it now.
