Hannah & Emil Read Online Free PDF

would ask.
    â€˜Well, love,’ he said eventually, his accent strange, almost English but foreign too. His skin was dark, but he was not an Indian. They were darker, and spoke up and down, as though they were half singing. An Indian officer had stood right here where this man did a few months before and Father had struck up a conversation. It had been mesmerising. This man here said, ‘Got a couple of ounces for us, then, have you?’
    I jumped down from my stool, the shock travelling through my feet, and turned my back to him, reaching up to the high shelf for the tobacco jar. Having placed it on the counter I climbed back onto the stool, unstoppered the jar and measured the cool moist tobacco onto a square of paper, careful not to spill any, breathing in the smell. It was like Father’s clothes, but more concentrated, unsullied by shaving soap and coffee.
    He leaned forward as he tipped the tobacco into his tin, his face so close that I caught cologne, brilliantine, saw where the tiny bristles of blond hair ruptured the weathered skin. ‘Smells like heaven,’ he said, eyes closed. It was as though he had considerately placed his soldier’s face there for me to take a good long look. There were beads of sweat at his temple, white bushy eyebrows with the little hairs bursting straight out in every direction, purple threads in an old man’s swollen nose, deep lines at the corner of his eyes, furrows at his brow. Yet his head was a grown-up boy’s, somehow.
    The stairs behind me creaked and the soldier stood up straight. Father came through the doorway, his round stomach brushing my back as he passed. ‘Sir! We have whatever you need. Just ask the question. Whatever you are looking for. Whatever at all. Is my Hannah helpful?’
    â€˜She’s a good girl you’ve got there, sir. No doubt about it.’ I listened to the vowels. They were stretched, flat, long, the consonants soft. I watched his lips and tongue as he formed the sounds.
    â€˜Ah!’ said Father, studying the soldier. ‘You are Australian! Welcome! Welcome to London! Very cold for you, I expect.’
    â€˜No colder than a muddy ditch.’ He eyed me for a moment, and then Father. More, I thought, say more! It was one of those moments in which a window into adulthood gusts open and is quickly slammed shut. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Forget where I am.’
    â€˜Oh, that’s quite all right. You must relax. Enjoy your stay in London. We are happy to have you here with us.’
    Later, in the bathroom, Geoffrey banging on the door, I practised the sounds in the mirror, shaping my mouth in ways I had not shaped them before, stretching my lips around the words, making my whispering voice undulate with the phrases. ‘Smells like hea ven. No colder than a muddy ditch .’
    â€˜HANNAH!’ Geoffrey was almost screaming. ‘I’m about to go on the floor!’
    I opened the door, mimicked his agonised face, and after a moment let him by.

    I slept with Mother in those days. When the zeppelin-raid siren sounded, which I could sleep through if left alone, I was always the first to be pushed out of bed. Mother did not sleep at all, it seemed to me. Mothers did not need sleep like other people. They lay awake, listening to you dream, so that they might shove you out from under the warm covers the instant the siren came. In the quieter moments when the siren faded, before it built up again, Father’s snoring throbbed through the wall and the floor. My brothers would try to wake him. ‘Papa. Papa! ’
    I bundled up the quilt and pillows into a shape that I could carry and after Mother had intervened in the bedroom we were all stumbling down the narrow twisting staircase to the shop, trying not to knock jars of sweets from the shelves with our loads on our way through, scurrying down Tottenham Court Road with all the other dark figures and their fat bundles of bedding,