I Am Always With You by Philip Temple

Author:Philip Temple [Philip Temple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775533542
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes Maria felt herself beginning to slide again, more often at night, when she had drawn the blackout curtains, fed and put Tim to bed and tried to write and nothing came to her as she sat staring at the typewriter, half wondering if the alarm would sound. Then everything seemed hopeless and pointless and she doubted she would ever write again. She would distract herself by writing to Blumenthal or collecting together food and tobacco items for another parcel. It seemed this was the only real way she could send her affection and concern — better than words which became repetitive in a way that coffee or cigarettes or tins of sardines never could. It was a way also of alleviating the guilt she felt, for being at home and at least having the opportunity to write while he was cut off from his colleagues and work.

Yet life at home had become narrower, harder, colder. Outside the grinding daily routine of queuing for rationed food, attending to Tim, cooking, cleaning, washing, coping with alarms, writing letters to Blumenthal, to Milly in Essen, to her mother, Rita and Willi in Neisse, even to Isermeyer who sent her cards from France, she had less and less time and energy even to visit Noa. When Maria went for tea at Noa’s at the beginning of October, she realised they had not met for four months. ‘Oh, how I have missed you!’ Maria said, kissing her on both cheeks.

‘Slowly everything worthwhile is being squeezed out of us,’ Noa said. She gestured at the books and papers scattered across the large table in the main room of the Ravensberger Strasse flat. Geka and Noa had spent most of the summer at their tower house in Hohnstein, a clifftop town in Saxon Switzerland, east of Dresden. Far from Berlin officialdom, without radio or newspapers, they worked together at translating and editing books that were unlikely to see the light of day until what they termed the ‘interregnum of state terror’ was over. Back in Berlin, quietly but obdurately, they toiled at handbook and classic texts that pushed the limits of the censor’s acceptance, resisting all attempts to squeeze the economic life out of the company. Noa picked up an official letter, and another and another, and threw them before Maria. ‘They try everything. For this book they will not allow us paper; for this one it cannot be printed until 1942; for this one the censor’s office has requested another appraisal. Geka is down at the censor’s office right now trying to sort that out.’ For a moment, a smile crossed her face and Maria saw a glint of the old light in her eyes. Noa went on, ‘But you know, I have never seen him get angry. I think it is because he is so strong in himself. He knows what is valuable and right and nothing can shake him from that.’

Maria said, ‘Pouf! How can everyone be like Geka? If only that was possible, we wouldn’t be in this terrible mess.

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