Tomorrow E-Book

Elisabeth Russell Taylor

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

'The island was singularly without pretension; just a modest chrysalis-shaped piece of undulating pasture, arable and marshland – a place ignored by those who required drama of an obvious kind' Every year Elisabeth Danziger travels to the Danish island of Møn to spend one week at The Tamarisks, a lavish hotel which was once, fifteen years ago in 1945, her family's second home. With each annual visit, Elisabeth stays in the same room and walks familiar paths. She visits the local museum to peer at artefacts that once belonged to her family; she unscrews the panel of an old bath tub to retrieve the crumbling piece of paper on which is written her name and that of Daniel Eberhardt – her beloved cousin. Elisabeth's annual pilgrimage is part of a long-standing family promise to meet again in Møn after their separation during the War. A promise that only she has fulfilled. And she has no reason to suspect this year will be any different from all the others...

Leseprobe

‘Winningly written in unshowy but graceful prose, full of precise observations and unexpected lines. A compelling book with a surprise ending.’

– Observer

‘Leaves the reader reeling, from a combination of admiration and outrage and perplexity that only a very fine quality of writing can provoke.’

– Financial Times

‘Taylor writes with an artist’s eye. I have rarely been so enraptured by a book’s dignity and discernment.’

– Jewish Chronicle

TOMORROW

Elisabeth Russell Taylor

DAUNT BOOKS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEINTRODUCTIONMORGENPREFACESEPTEMBER 1960SUNDAYMONDAYTUESDAYWEDNESDAYTHURSDAYFRIDAYSATURDAYABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY ELISABETH RUSSELL TAYLORCOPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

My first experience of Elisabeth Russell Taylor’s work was the short story ‘Les Amants’, which appears in her collection Belated. It is a deeply touching and resonant story, which opens with the background detail of a small community haunted by a tragic crime of which ‘succeeding generations continued to bear the weight’, their village becoming ‘a continual reminder of the past’. The village is perched above the river Seine, the houses gouged out of the chalk cliffs. The protagonist, an inhabitant of the village since she was eighteen, is now seventy. The death of her lover has left her with no appetite for eating or socialising; she has been finding it hard to sleep. ‘How to invest life with meaning when the heart had been torn from it?’

Russell Taylor’s novel Tomorrow could be asking the same question, except that there is a far greater wound at the centre of this story. The protagonist, Elisabeth Danziger, is driven only by a determination to keep the vow she and her childhood sweetheart made before the outbreak of the Second World War: to return every August to the same place, so that in due course they would be reunited. Even though she has long since abandoned hope, ‘She must not give in. If she could no longer rise to an adventurous life of the spirit, she could keep doggedly on.’ This zestless persistence is reminiscent of a line halfway through the novel, in which Elisabeth Danziger recalls someone saying ‘that playing patience was the nearest thing to being dead.’

Making her annual visit to the Danish island of Møn, Miss Danziger is excessively regular in her habits. She and the hotelier Fru Møller are courteous to one another; Elisabeth pretends not to notice Fru Møller’s ‘absurdities’. Tea is taken in the drawing room, a gong is sounded for dinner, everyone eats the same main course, coffee is taken in the study and conversation is ‘orchestrated’. Lurking at the edges of this order and propriety is a churning and potentially overwhelming darkness that is all the more terrible for the contrast. This deceptively cool style brackets Elisabeth Russell Taylor with some of my favourite writers: Anita Brookner, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark and Edith Wharton spring to mind.

In fiction, the seashore is frequently a threshold not only between land and sea but between what the land represents – order; social and personal stability – and what the sea represents – chaos; social or personal breakdown. There is a connection, too, between the sea and the past. W. H. Auden wrote of the sea as ‘that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.’ The sea encroaches, eroding or flooding the land. In seaside narratives, there is an undermining of society and sense of self. In BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, in a programme on the topic of ‘Literary Landscape: The Coast’, Dr Alicia Rix suggested that if literature has technically ‘moved on from the age of sea monsters,’ these monsters have perhaps ‘only been replaced with psychological demons.’

On the small island of Møn, Elisabeth Danziger is closely surrounded by sea. We feel the intense pull – the inescapable undertow – of the past. The first chapter begins in the present, in September 1960, but we soon find ourselves back in the inter-war years, in which two young Aryan German men who teach at a German university marry Jewish twins. Although living in Germany, in apartments close to the university, the couples also establish houses on Møn, which is near the German coast, and visit during the university holidays. Meanwhile, Germany’s soil is ‘being raked over for an unprecedented crop of anti-semitism’. Professors Jurgen Danziger and Horst Eberhardt are considered ‘tainted by association through their wives’: social invitations from their colleagues are scarce, and as the Second World War approaches, they find their teaching duties curtailed. The two couples begin to spend less time in their German apartments and more time on the island of Møn.

Chapter two, as if making an effort to stay in the present, begins again in the autumn of 1960, and yet already we have stepped back a little way into the past. As Elisabeth Danziger arrives at the hotel, The Tamarisks, her suitcase brushes up against the foliage at her side, ‘dispersing pungent, dank summer scents that instantaneously prised open the veins of memory’, and we understand that we, along with Elisabeth, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘boats against the current’, are going to be ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past’. From this recent past, Elisabeth – in an image that almost makes me feel the cold seawater filling her lungs – is ‘lured … deeper and deeper back, down, into the past’.

Elisabeth is in the yellow room, where her suitcase slumps ‘thin and old’, so that the yellow seems sickly. It is difficult to take in this detail without Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s yellow wallpaper coming to mind, the ‘things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will’; the woman or many women creeping about behind the pattern, trapped within it; the sense of suppressed yet overwhelming mental anguish. This association reminds me of a sequence in Janet Frame’s autobiography, in which the hated Miss Low and her ‘castor oil from the hated slim, blue glass bottle’ are echoed in ‘Miss Botting, a woman in a blue costume the same colour as the castor-oil bottle’. What might otherwise be an innocent blue now connotes what is hated; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s yellow evokes not beautiful yellow things ‘like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.’ Elisabeth Danziger’s troublingly yellow room faces the ‘grumous’ sea; the seaweed-scented air gets into her lungs and caught in the curtains; salt clings insistently to her face. We have, in this layering of imagery, a keen sense of a traumatic and tenacious past.

We are acutely aware of the sea throughout this novel. In the opening sentence, the sea is being watched. It is a ‘menacing sea: potentially dangerous, urged on by the tide, looking for a killing.’ It ‘has encroached all round the coast’ of the flat island. A long-awaited letter has an envelope ‘the colour of today’s sea’, as if this ‘dark and leaden’ sea could soak into anything and everything. The narrative itself is bracketed by the sea, enclosed by ‘the bice waters of the Baltic’ and the sweeping waves. It is on this island that seems so vulnerable to the rapacious sea that the Danziger and Eberhardt children, cousins and lovers Elisabeth and Daniel, hear that the war is coming, that it is imminent. Decades later, Elisabeth observes that Møn has been violated by the sea: ‘The land had been raped years past by the sea. All that remained on the barren expanse was a deafening silence.’ In this description, we also recognise Elisabeth herself, who ‘never spoke about her feelings’.

There is, then, a suggestion of psychological disturbance, which becomes manifest on the occasions when Elisabeth is overwhelmed by ‘an intolerable weight of memory; not that of individual occasions but of the entire past’. Visiting the island’s museum, she suffers an auditory hallucination: ‘This dreadful invasion was one with which she was familiar: something between a hum and a buzz, and terrifying for being unresponsive to any attempt to silence it. She must wait. She must wait – as she had to when pursued by the sound at night – for it to pass.’ She hears her own voice cry out, ‘A mine!’ In the church, when an ancient Hebrew word meaning ‘it would have been enough!’ rises from her, she is at first unaware that the word emanated from herself. In the garden at The Tamarisks, when a wail of ‘Mutti!’ begins to rise to the surface, she stuffs a handkerchief into her mouth to suppress it. On her trip to look at frescos that interpret the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, the slaughter of children, she closes her eyes, as in the museum, ‘and, as she did so, valves that normally regulated memory burst open. It was terrible: pure pain.’ Like Elisabeth, the reader must then witness at close quarters the most terrible act, the unbearable trauma at the heart of Tomorrow. In that moment, ‘Life in progress has ceased. Time has stopped.’ The difficulty of continuing in the present is echoed in Elisabeth’s difficulty in swallowing her food; more than once she almost chokes on her meals. ‘My body gets itself into a state of refusal,’ she explains. ‘Life “sticks in my throat”, I suppose.’

It is pertinent that The Tamarisks was Elisabeth Danziger’s childhood home before the war, and remains unchanged. ‘It was a relief to know that the house had not been depleted and that it remained uncontaminated. Elisabeth never craved to remove items; to take anything away from The Tamarisks would be, she felt, to disfigure a perfectly beautiful body.’ At this point in the narrative, the significance of the metaphor is painfully apparent.

The past inhabits nooks and crannies. At The Tamarisks, in a small dusty box in ‘the subterranean depths’ beneath the bath, Elisabeth has kept a fossil, one of a dozen items secreted in adult-proof places by the cousins in childhood, before the war: ‘It’ll be wonderful to have a treasure-hunt when we eventually return!’ The past possesses people; they get stuck. At the hotel, a female guest nearing seventy behaves like a little girl, having ‘resolutely refused to emerge’ from childhood; playing with dolls, Bo-Bo is ‘drawn back in the slip-stream of time to her ecstatic infancy’. Meanwhile Bo-Bo’s husband comes annually to Møn for the moths and fossils. The past is where life really dwells; ‘what was alive of Daniel was their past together and her memories of it’.

There is a poignant anecdote about a blind woman who had, on the wall of her cottage, a seascape painted by her father, ‘a thick impasto of raging waves’. After taking down the painting and donating it to the museum, the artist hung a papier mâché tray in its place, so that his daughter would ‘not feel the absence of the picture.’ Where once the sea raged, the papier mâché tray hangs blankly, infused with no meaning other than to be where something is expected to be, filling the space.

The idea of ‘tomorrow’ is significant of course, and punctuates the narrative. ‘Tomorrow,’ Fru Møller says to Elisabeth, ‘we’re promised fine weather’; ‘Tomorrow …’ say the guests, anticipating a fishing expedition. But in the morning, it is raining heavily; there is thunder and lightning: ‘What they had wanted was to have gone on a fishing expedition. Such a delightful prospect! And now this had happened! It might blight the whole of their stay …’ Back in 1939, Elisabeth and Daniel plan a recital that is to ‘both begin and close with Strauss’s Morgen.’ Lines from Mackay’s poem – Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen: And tomorrow the sun will shine again – repeat through the novel like the voice that keeps trying to rise in Elisabeth, like something briefly seen through cracks and gaps in the present-day narrative, like the ‘grey shroud of sky … torn in places to reveal streaks of blood red and aquamarine blue.’ We find the poem in full at the beginning and at the end of the novel, and lines from it at the beginning and at the end of Elisabeth’s stay. In this beautifully structured novel, lives go unlived, rendezvous are missed, messages are delayed or undelivered. ‘You see,’ Elisabeth says to Daniel, as they plan the recital and the performance of the Strauss piece, ‘by starting with it you emphasise the wholly hopeful, optimistic expectations the words imply and then, by ending with it, you can stress the double-edged sword quality: the irony. It’s hopeless trying to plan for tomorrow’.

Year after year, Elisabeth makes this journey to the island, stays at the same hotel, in her usual room, and keeps so strictly to the same itinerary that it would be possible ‘to forecast precisely where she will be on the island at any moment of her stay’. The repetition is reminiscent of a ghost story in which a spirit makes some journey or performs some action over and over again. Elisabeth is compelled to do this even though it causes her mind to ‘swell with memories’ so that she ‘feared the bounds of her mind would burst and she would be swamped, her sanity irretrievable in the flood damage.’ Like the sea that surrounds her, the past is vast and ever-present. It is in a room that appears ‘oceanic’ that the heart-wrenching ending takes place.

There are brutal and vivid images in the novel that remain with me. When revisited and reconsidered, the description of ‘a stone the dimensions of a child’s bicycle wheel, in which a huge ammonite was embedded’ brought tears to my eyes. In a novel so concerned with the way in which the past hangs around to haunt us, it is fitting that Tomorrow itself should linger so disquietingly in the reader’s mind.

ALISON MOORE, 2018

TOMORROW

MORGEN

Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen

Und auf dem Wege, den ich gehen werde,

Wird uns, die Glücklichen, sie wieder einen

Inmitten dieser sonnenatmenden Erde …

Und zu dem Strand, dem weiten, wogenblauen,

Werden wir still und langsam niedersteigen,

Stumm werden wir uns in die Augen schauen,

Und auf uns sinkt des Glückes stummes Schweigen …

And tomorrow the sun will shine again

and on the path we walk in our happiness

it will again unite us

in the midst of this sun-breathing earth …

And to the wide shore with its blue waves

we shall again descend, slow and still,

mutely we shall look into each other’s eyes

and the silence of happiness will again sink upon us …

JOHN HENRY MACKAY

English translation by S.S. Prawer

Music by Richard Strauss

PREFACE

Denmark was occupied by the German army on 9 April 1940. The steadfast behaviour of the Danish authorities and the unanimous opinion of the Danish people persuaded the Germans not to molest the Jews. However, in September 1943 the mounting efforts of the Danish Resistance movement led to martial law being declared. With it the position of the Jews became dangerous.

A popular movement for the rescue of the whole Jewish population was launched. Within three weeks 7,200 Jews were smuggled to safety in neutral Sweden. Five hundred Jews, ignorant of the plan for their rescue, were seized by the Nazis and sent to Theresienstadt where they remained until the spring of 1945. The intervention of the Swedish Red Cross resulted in their being removed to Sweden.

At the end of the war the Jews returned to Denmark. They found their businesses and their houses intact. The stewardship of ordinary Danish people had been exemplary.

Less than two per cent of Danish Jews perished.