Grey Moon

The van ran without trouble. There were vehicles everywhere for the taking now, and they had picked a good one, with proper seats, all of them, and the back stacked with boxes they were carrying to the people in Germany. Ten of them rode in it, the little ones wedged among the boxes or asleep across a lap. There was nothing on the road to slow them. The lanes ran clear to the edge of seeing, and where there were cars they were off in the gateways and on the verges with their doors shut, left tidy, as if everyone had agreed at once to stop and walk away from them.

A tall girl called Mar drove the long stretches, and Ana sat where she could watch the back of her head — the plait she had learned by the second day, and how it worked loose by afternoon. The big ones took the wheel in turns and minded the small ones in turns and nobody told anybody to. Ana had asked, the first day, who was in charge, and a boy had grinned and said the van was, and that had turned out to be near enough true. A couple of times someone started a song and the whole van took it up, the big ones loud and certain, Ana catching the ends of the lines and singing those.

At noon the radio under the dash — a fat long-range set that hissed and muttered all day in voices from other vans and other houses — told them where to fill up, and they turned off for a farm. It was a big working place, with a green pump in the yard for the tractors and people who came out to meet them, older ones and young together, which Ana had stopped expecting to see. A woman set bread and a hard yellow cheese on the tailgate while the tank filled, and would take nothing for it but the news off the radio. The pump drew from its own tank, sunk in the ground for the harvest, and it worked.

While the tank filled, Ana had the cart, a four-wheeled one, the folding kind made for camping gear, better than the prams they’d started with. Moving the boxes across the yard on it was her job, hers to do, and she did it with her weight thrown into the handle. There was a little boy, three or four, who had fixed himself to her side somewhere in the first days and rode pressed against her in the van and slept there; she kept an arm over him on the bends the way the big ones kept an arm over her. She did not know whose he was, and no one seemed to, and she kept the arm over him anyway.

Around her neck she wore a scarf of her mother’s. She had it on day and night and nobody made her take it off. The exercise book she kept on her too. On the roadsides now and then a board went past — plywood bolted to a signpost, painted white, the open-house kind, the word for food on it in two languages and an arrow. They did not stop at those. They had their own house to reach.

---

They crossed into Germany at the grey end of the afternoon. There was no barrier and no one in the booths; the plaza stood open and empty. Everything official did now. But the signs went over from French to German between one and the next, and these she could read properly, and that was how she knew. Ausfahrt. Town names that leaned, the further they went, toward the names she had. She watched them come and said nothing about it.

The house they stopped at for the rest day had been a school, set back from a village, with a yard and a flagpole. On the pole the children had run up a flag of their own, a bedsheet painted with a sun and big uneven letters, and it lifted and dropped in the evening wind. It was the kind of place she knew now — young people running it, a rota chalked on a door, a fire never quite let out — but it was further along than the others. There was hot water; she washed standing up in a tiled room full of steam and came out pink. There was food at a table, on plates, sitting down. A small child had drawn a dog and a house in wax crayon on the wall by the stairs, and nobody had cleaned it off. When it got dark, lights came on. Not many, run carefully off something on the roof, but lights, in the evening, in rooms, the way it used to be.

There were children her own age, more of them together than she had seen in a long time, and after the meal they took her into a game in the yard without asking her much, which was the best way. It had complicated rules and she learned them by playing and getting them wrong, and for an hour she was a child in a yard in a game — running, called for, out of breath — and nothing else.

The radio worked for a long time that evening. The next leg was planned out on it in pieces, house to house: in the morning she would change vans. A group was going south, down toward Freiburg, and she would go with them the rest of the way home; the ones she had come with would turn west. It was settled around her and told to her once, plainly, and she understood it and did not argue.

Mar found her before sleep and made nothing of it: gave her a folded square of chocolate from somewhere, said the southern lot were sound and she’d be home in a day or two, and that was that. Ana put the chocolate in the book to keep, then thought better of it and ate it.

Before the lights went she sat with the book on her knees and wrote the day down in her round, careful hand, leaving nothing out: the farm and the green pump, the cheese, the game, the vans changing in the morning. Then she slept inside, in a row of mattresses with the small boy on one side, warm in a way the van never got, so warm her arms went heavy and far away. Somebody passing in the dark said the word they all said, the leaving-and-arriving word, low, to no one — Safe — and she was gone before she could have said it back.

---

The southbound van brought her into Freiburg in the afternoon. She knew the turns before she could have named them, and then she knew the street, and then the building: the grey front, the courtyard, the third-floor windows that were hers. The southern lot waited at the kerb while she went up. They were not in a hurry; nobody was, any more.

The flat was exactly as it had been left. That was the strangeness of it: not wrecked, not robbed, only stopped. Her mother’s coat on the hook. The breakfast things put away. The clocks were still going, still right, the kitchen one and the little one in the hall, keeping the proper time in the empty rooms as if they had not been told. Ana went through it without touching much. In her own room she lay down on her own bed, on top of the cover, in her shoes, and stayed there a while looking at the ceiling she had looked at all her life, and the house was very quiet, and the clocks went on keeping the time.

Then one of the southern girls called up the stairwell that they should go, and Ana got up. She took two new exercise books from the drawer in her desk — the blank ones, kept for a school year that wasn’t going to start — and put them with the one she had. She asked the girl the name of the house they were taking her to, and the street, and wrote it down. On the way out she asked if they could stop a floor down; there was another door she wanted to try.

It was Marko’s, and it was locked. She had known it would be. He had written that he was coming, not that he was here, and she had read it twice and understood it. But she tried the handle anyway, and knocked, and when nothing answered she did the thing she had come down to do. She tore a page from one of the new books and wrote where she would be, the house and the street and the girl’s name for it, and signed it, and slipped it under his door, far enough in that it would not be lost.

The house they took her to had been a big school on the edge of the city, and it was the best-kept place she had been in since London stopped being London. The lights worked, off panels and batteries someone understood. There was a kitchen with a rota pinned up and people cooking in it at proper hours. The little ones had lessons in the mornings, sums and letters, at desks. There was a board in the hall, a real one, that talked to the other houses when the power was good.

They took her in as the others had, without fuss and without a ceremony: a bed in a room with three other girls, a peg with her name going up that afternoon, a place at the table, a job on the rota for the morning. By the evening she had been folded in so completely that it was hard to remember she had come only that day.

---

He came the next day, in the afternoon, on a bicycle, with the road still on him, burnt and thin and not steady on his feet. He had been to the building first; he had her note in his pocket, the torn page with the house and the street in her round hand. At the door he asked for her by name, and then, before they fetched her, he asked the ones who ran the place something else, quietly, in the hall: whether he should tell her about her father, or leave it. He had decided things the whole way here and had not been able to decide this one.

They were young, the ones he asked: teenagers, a couple past twenty. They heard him out. One of them, a girl with a level look, said he should tell her, and tell her straight, and that it should be him, since he was the one who’d been there. The hidden things were the ones that went wrong in the little ones, she said; she’d seen it more than once. She said it as if it were settled practice, which by now it likely was. He said all right. He had wanted, he realised, to be told not to.

When they brought her down she did not run to him. She stopped a little way off and looked at him as if checking him against what she remembered. Then she came and put her arms round him, briefly, and stepped back. She had got taller, or he had got smaller. She asked if he’d had a hard time on the road, and he said not too bad.

He had meant to do it gently, in stages. He got as far as Papa, and that he had been with Papa on the road, and that Papa had been very tired, more tired than the medicine could — and she said, “He died.” Not a question. Her hand had gone up to the scarf at her neck. “On the road. With you.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought so.” Her face had not changed yet. “I kept the phone for him the whole way. I charged it last night, when there was the plug. He didn’t ring.” She said it like the end of a sum that had only ever had the one answer. “If he could have rung, he would have rung.”

And then, now that she had stopped speaking, it came up through her all at once — her face going, her breath catching and tearing, no words in it now or only the edges of them, Papa and once and something he couldn’t make out — and he got down onto the floor of the hall, which his knees did not want to do, and held on to her while she did it. A couple of the young ones stood close without crowding. One went to fetch water nobody would drink.

When it had passed its worst he said the thing he had come to say, and made a poor job of it, because he had no practice and because it was true, and the two together undid his sentences. He wanted to look after her now, he said. She could come and live with him; he would manage it, whatever it took. That he was sorry — here he lost the thread and found it again — sorry he had not been more use, before, with any of it, with her mother or with getting her home or with Papa; that he had been too slow at all of it; but that he was here now, and meant to stay, and she was not to worry about being looked after.

Ana wiped her face on the scarf and considered it with the seriousness she gave to everything. The house was good, she said. She had a bed and a peg with her name and a job in the mornings; there were the other children, and the little boy who was hers to mind; she was going to be happy here, she could tell already. She did not want to be looked after in a flat by one person. She wanted to be here.

But he could come and see her, she said. Every day, if he liked. There was always food, and he could meet the little boy, and she would show him the board and how it reached the other houses. She said it as an arrangement, a thing to set up properly, and asked when he would start.

He said tomorrow. She said good. Mornings were best, after lessons. Then she went to tell the girl with the level look that he would be coming, so they’d know to expect him at the door.

---

[In one of the blank exercise books she took from her desk. The same hand, years later:]

He came the next morning. He had Borko with him, alive, and my paper still taped to the lid. He had done it exactly, the whole way.

He came one more time.

— A.