By Richard Hill

(For Jean Hill)

Christmas is a time for memories, of times gone by and friends lost and passed away, and for you of a Christmas spent in cold and snow in another country and a story of terror whispered in the night.

You always believed that we move through time, heading, willing or not, from the past into the future, moving through time until our own time ran out, ceased.

Now, older and lessened, you have discovered that time moves through us, taking away youth and health and dreams, leaving only what clings by will or by accident, to the person we have become. And the memories that remain are seldom what we would choose. Often they haunt us like ghosts; for what are memories, if not ghosts.

You remember that Christmas now as you would remember a ghost story, the classic old-fashioned ghost story, of travellers, strangers, thrown together for a winter night in a strange place, an old inn, or a haunted house.

The classic elements may have been there, but your experience was more mundane, more prosaic, like your companions. You were one of a party of teachers and administrators from assorted educational establishments in your own country, sent to Eastern Europe as one of those well-meaning, but always ineffectual, government funded schemes to coordinate international standards of education. There had been thirty members of your party, transported to assorted colleges and universities to observe and judge, and, in turn, you supposed, to be observed and judged yourself.

You have always been unable to separate your judgment of yourself from the judgment of others. Even now, as you write this, as you read what you've written, you judge your story. As what? Inept? Unclear? Like your memory. You know only that words are too weak to support the reality of what you heard and felt on that night.

You were nearly at the end of your tour, jaded with the long journey and with your travelling companions, when the story joined itself to your life.

The story, of a curse and a haunting, began at the end of a long drive. When, by one of those vagaries of your journey, to which you have become resigned, you arrived or, in your own tired mind, been delivered, like an unwelcome and ill-addressed parcel, to your hotel, you were told that there had been a mistake in the booking and that sadly there were no beds available for you and three of your party. The receptionist, a nervous youth with bad skin, finally phoned a nearby hotel, which had accommodation, and so you unlucky four ended up at the ‘Hotel Europa Star’. You had hoped to be home in time for Christmas, but delays and diversions meant that you would spend the night in this dismal place.

When you arrived at the hotel it had been almost half empty, with the decayed air of a building clinging on to life, and not doing it very well, and the food you had  been given was every bit as bad as the accommodation. Still, you told each other, it was only for one night and you would soon be home.

As well as yourself, your little group was made of an attractive young woman called Jane, an even younger redheaded teacher called Warren, and the oldest of the four of us, the tall thin headmaster of an inner-city Academy called Steve, who had had the foresight and experience to bring along a bottle of Irish whiskey, which you were soon sharing.

Outside the hotel it had begun to snow, not the anaemic city snow which you were all used to, but the wild and extravagant snow of the countryside. You had been sitting around what passed as a fire in one of the reception rooms, a 70’s faux log fire, giving out more light than heat, exchanging horror stories about your respective rooms, with their loose sinks and deadly wiring. It was then that the woman called Jane suddenly said,

“My mother would hate it here. She was afraid of Poland, ever since my father died.”

Steve refilled your glasses and you all leaned forward. Everyone else, you were sure, was as curious as you were to hear about her mother's fear of an entire country. A romance gone wrong perhaps? Had she had a bad experience here, or with a Pole back in England?

Jane looked up from her glass surprised, you thought, at our interest.

“Did something happen to her when she was here?” Warren asked.

Jean gave a nervous smile.

“No, she's never been here.”

 And so, in a strange hotel in a strange land, as the snow whispered against the windows, she told us her story.

“It was a long time ago, but I'll never forget. My father was a tall man, very quiet, very distant; dignified and somehow vague. He left when I was too young for me to know more about him than that. Not much to remember him by, I know. The other thing I remember is that he never drank alcohol, not in any form, ever. He was the barrister, one of the best, diligent and quite brilliant. And he was an honest man in a world in which they have become an endangered species. He made enough money to retire early and we moved, if not to the country, to the furthest of suburbs of the city. We moved to a big house where my mother could enjoy her love of gardening, and, since I was born late in their marriage, and I had no brothers or sisters, I became not only her daughter, but for her companion. We were friends. And my father gave full rein to his passion for antiques. My mother told me that he constantly bemoaned the loss of small antique shops to online buying and selling.  She said that whenever he heard of an antique shop going out of business, he would lament the loss like that of an old friend. One of his favourite antique shops wasn’t far from where we lived, and if he had an unsuccessful trip to the antique shops in town, he would call in there to see if he could pick up what he called a consolation prize. Its stock was as much bric-a-brac as antiques, which was one of the main reasons for it being my father's favourite. One of the reasons that my father so hated the growing online trade in antiques, was his love of poking around in such shops, searching in dusty corners, looking for hidden treasures.”

“You can't pick up something beautiful from a computer screen.” He would tell my mother. “You can't feel its weight or touch its beauty.”

He had found the wine glass on the back of a shelf full of chipped and dusty glassware and china. The owner of the shop was not very enthusiastic about it.

“Just the one I'm afraid, Polish crystal. It's not old, mid-20th century. Buy the silver cigar cutter, and I’ll throw it in for nothing.”

“And so my father bought the crystal wine glass.”

“My mother told me that it was beautiful, heavy and ornate, and yet when you held in your hand, it seemed almost to lift itself towards your lips, and when it was cleaned it shone and glistened like no glass she has ever seen.

‘Let's put it on the mantel piece,’ she said to my father. ‘We can't use one odd glass when we have guests to dinner.’

But my father decided to use the glass himself. From the first time he drank from it my mother said he began to enthuse about it.

‘I know it can't be so.’ he would say ‘but something about it, something in the type of glass, I don't know what, makes any wine taste delicious, even cheap plonk.’ And then, as if to prove his point, he would drain it and refill it.

“That was how it began. At first my mother wasn't concerned. Often, when he came home with what he called a ‘special buy’ he would be like a child showing off a new toy until the novelty palled, and then he would sell it or trade it in at another antique shop. But the wine glass was different. Like a child's favourite toy, it seemed to be always with him, and he began to be constantly drinking. My mother had seen addiction among some of her friends, for drugs, affairs, shopping, but they had all been gradual, growing slowly, like an illness. With my father it was different. He became a drunkard in a matter of weeks, and not what’s sometimes called a happy drunk. He became distant and angry, finding fault and becoming dictatorial, looking always for a culprit to vent his anger on. He became obsessed with what he called ‘lowlife’. Once, watching a TV news item about violence in some inner-city sink estate, he started shouting at the television. Those people weren’t human, he said, and stood up spilling wine from the glass, which was always with him.”

 ‘Vermin that's what they are. Sub-human vermin!  But we know what to do with them, don’t we? Let them wallow in their filth. We'll sweep away the filth and those vermin with it. A year from now they'll all be dead, and you and I will be able to breathe clean air again!’

“My mother had, for the first time in her life, been afraid, afraid of my father, and she had confided in me.

‘It wasn't your father behind those eyes anymore. I didn't know him. So much anger and loathing, so much hatred. He almost knocked me down, yelling at me to get out of his way, that he was going to bed, that there was more cleaning up to be done in the morning.’

“I remember that day one of those dead, dark, English afternoons with all the colour of the world sucked into the greyness of the sky. And how my life changed in that moment of my mother's frightened confidence.”

Jane paused and seemed to bring the focus of her bright dark eyes back to us and the room around her.

“I'm sorry; this is all silly; let’s talk about something else.”

You remember leaning towards Jane, and the sound of your own voice, sounding nervous and unfamiliar.

“Were you pleased when she told you what had happened? I think I might've been. Pleased about her trust, I mean.”

She looked around the room at the others.

“Most of us of spend all of lives without knowing our parents, not really knowing anything about them, until they die. And then it's too late.”

She reddened slightly and sat back. Someone asked what happened next.

“An anti-climax, really; my mother dropped the glass as she was putting it into the dishwasher. She was so flustered that she stepped on the few unbroken pieces of glass, so there was no possibility of ever repairing it.”

The same voice spoke again.

“And your father, what did he do when he realised that it was broken?”

Jane smiled, a thin, wintery smile.

“He divorced my mother; not right away of course. There was a terrible row over the glass, which grew into arguments that never seem to end. Arguments about nothing and everything, an endless war, which neither of them could win. It was round about then that I left home and got married. In fact, I was married almost at the same time as they were divorced. And my mother’s happier now than she ever was. And as for my father, he always wanted to go and live in Spain, and he did. I hardly ever heard from him, just the odd Christmas card, I do know that he doesn't drink anymore.”

You can never see snow without thinking of her story and that shabby far-off room. You remember the woman taking a sip of her drink as a sudden soft flutter of snow padded against the window softer even than her voice.

“I inherited my mother's curiosity, for better and sometimes for worse. She went once to the shop the glass came from, and she told me that she had been surprised at how much the owner knew about all the items in his packed little shop.”

‘Your husband was a strange collector.’ the man had told her. ‘Most people are interested in the provenance, in the history of the antiques they buy. They like the connection with the past though not, I suppose, the history of something like the glass your husband bought. He always bought what took his fancy for the look of the thing.’

“Like a magpie,” my mother had said, “things picked up easily, and just as easily discarded. So, was there a story behind the glass?”

Sitting there that night you remember wondering at the life of stories, of how they grow and change as they spread from person to person, from one time and place to another.

Jane seemed to be looking beyond us now, beyond the room, and beyond the present moment.

“The owner of the shop told me the answers to my mother's question when I went to see him after my father had died. When I told him who I was, he invited me to this little cubby at the back of the shop. It was cosy and peaceful in that antique shop; that's what I remember thinking, a quiet shore, where all the jetsam of the past had come to rest. His name was White, the owner, and he was white too, as old and pale and brittle looking as the china cups he took out. He offered me tea and we sat together at that table at the back of the shop, his eyes constantly straying to look out of the plate glass window of the shop; on the lookout I suppose, for customers who wanted to buy and not just to listen.”

‘There’s always a story,’ he said, ‘to every object we hold and use. Mostly we can never know what time and space it had found itself in and who it was used by and, for what purpose. Often when we find out it gives us pleasure, but sometimes we would be better not knowing. I bought the glass in Shropshire. I had gone to buy some rather nice prints, German street scenes of Dresden. 18th-century, quite beautiful. I had a buyer for that sort of thing and I had heard that this chap in Shropshire was selling off his collection which included the prints. A retired major he was, must have been eighty if he was a day. An antique himself, old and frail. He said that he was selling up and intended to end his days in the best nursing home that money could buy. He wasn't sentimental about his belongings. Most of it he described as his loot. Pillaged from a ruined Germany when he was there at the end of World War II. He threw in the glass for nothing. Originally, it seems there had been a set of six, and all but one had disappeared in transit from Germany. They came originally from Poland he told me. Looted by some Nazi he supposed - he laughed at the thought- and then looted by him.’

You remember Jane’s face, soft in the fire light. Her gaze had been far away back in the antique shop and now she suddenly focused on the faces around her.

“Sitting there,” she had said, “surrounded by all those pieces of the past which had been so precious to their long-dead owners, made what he told me believable. Right there and then the past seemed so much more solid and tangible than the present. And when he talked about the time the glass came from I believed what he told me and I still do. I'd read about the Nazis and what they had done in the countries they conquered, but I had seen them almost as pantomime villains, with their jackboots and those skull and crossbones badges on their caps. But in the year he told me about, in 1941, when the wine glasses were made, they weren’t pantomime monsters at all, but the creators of a modern, terrible hell. And now I know that it spread, their evil, across time as well as the countries they conquered. It was here in Poland that they were at their worst; they made it a country of murderers and their victims.”

“And the glasses, those beautiful glasses, were made by one of the victims for his murderer, for one of the most evil men in the most evil of times. His name has no meaning now, wiped away by history as he was. Like so many of the Nazis, in a well world he would have been no more than a mean and spiteful nonentity, but when the world grew sick, in those dark times, he rose. He was sent by Berlin to rule over a vast area of the conquered land, where he pillaged and terrorised and gave full rein to the darkness of his fantasies. He even lived in a castle, like some fairy tale Ogre.”

“Chaim Rozenblit was the last of generations of glassmakers, a man so talented that his genius was recognised throughout Poland. When the Ogre heard of his genius for creating beauty he had Rozenblit brought to him.”

Jane looked nervous, almost embarrassed.

“I'm sorry, this is beginning to sound like a fairy-tale, but it was such a time of darkness and monsters. Thousands of people were murdered every day. Jews like Rozenblit disappeared, killed in their homes or on the street, or taken in cattle trucks to who knew where. Rozenblit feared not just for his own life, but the lives of his whole family, and so, when the Ogre offered to save him and to save his family, if he made him a set of wine glasses more beautiful than any which had ever been seen, he had no choice. You understand why I see it as a dark fairy story? Of course as Ogres always do, he had Rozenblit and his family murdered as soon as the glasses had been delivered.”

You remember looking round that dimly lit room at the faces of your companions, your fellow listeners, wondering whether they felt the same horror and sadness that you did. One of them, the headmaster you think, asked the question you were about to ask.

“Did you ever find out what happened to him - the Nazi, the Ogre?”

Jane smiled faintly into the middle distance.

“He perished of course, as all Ogres should. But he wasn't slain by a hero riding a white horse. Or even shot or hanged at the end of the war. He died of drink, a raving alcoholic in SS sanatorium, sometime in late 1944. I like to think that in his last days, this body racked by alcohol poisoning, he was haunted by the ghosts of innocents he had murdered. I found a photograph of him, just one, on the Internet, a fat little man looking like the doorman of some third-rate hotel. He was at a party surrounded by his cronies, waving a glass full of wine at the camera; one of the glasses Rozenblit had made for him.”

The next morning you rejoined the rest of your party and your journey through Europe and the story was never mentioned during the rest of the trip.

You never heard from Jane, or any of the others, again, but every Christmas you remember that night, and her voice and her story have never left you. You think now, as you read what you have just written, of the years between that night and this night you now inhabit, and about how many times your memory has taken you back to that shabby room in that far off hotel, and, as you remember, you wonder about five missing wine glasses, and where they are, and who they are destroying, and how long fear and hatred can live on.

ENDS