Free Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger Page B

fit enough to work as slave labour in the German armament or clothes workshops were permitted to leave for their stints of work. All other Jews found trespassing outside the ghetto were shot, as were any Poles who helped them to pass into Aryan Kraków or who hid them.
    Tyskie! Ken applauds when I return to the table. You chose the best beer!
    Early training! I say.
    He’s called Zedrek, Ken says, the man you were watching playing chess. He comes to play with Abram the grocer at least once a week. Zedrek could play a good game if he didn’t start drinking vodka so early. I don’t think he can stop though. Abram as a small boy survived the war in hiding.
    Ken taught me most of the games I know: chess, snooker, darts, billiards, poker, table tennis, backgammon. Chess we played in his bed-sitting rooms, the others in bars. Bridge, which I had learnt before I met him, we played with my parents or when we got invited to somebody’s house, which was not often.
    I met him in 1937. He was a replacement teacher in the lunatic boarding school to which I had been bundled. In front of the school assembly – fifty barekneed cowed boys, each trying to find, unaided, a sense to life – the apoplectic headmaster threw a dining-room chair at the Latin teacher and Ken, who happened to be between them, caught it with one hand in mid-flight. This is how I first noticed him. He set the chair down on the podium, put his feet up on it, and the boss continued to harangue.
    In the final day of that same term I invited him to a caravan my parents had on a beach near Selsea Bill in Sussex. Why not? he said. And he came for a week.
    My father was pleased, for, now making a foursome, we could play bridge together.
    Shall we play for money, Sir? asked Ken. Otherwise the bids don’t count.
    Agreed, but the stakes shouldn’t be too high, because of John here.
    Tuppence a hundred?
    I’ll go and fetch my purse, said my mother.
    Ken shuffled the pack and the cards cascaded between his two hands held far apart. Sometimes the cascade looked like a moving staircase, an escalator or a playing-cards ladder. Once, later, he said to me, when I was complaining of not being able to go to sleep: Imagine you’re shuffling a pack of cards! That’s how I go to sleep.
    Cut for deal.
    My father enjoyed the game, not only because he was a good player, but, more, because the game allowed him to recall certain easy moments with the dead, who otherwise haunted him. When the four of us were playing in Selsea, ’Six Diamonds Doubled’ took precedence over ’Five Mortars Lost’. He was playing with us, but also with a roll of infantry officers of which he was the only survivor after four years in the trenches near Vimy Ridge and Ypres.
    My mother quickly recognised that Ken belonged to what for her was the special category of ’people who loved Paris’.
    Watching the three of us playing quoits on the sand, she foresaw, I’m sure, that the passeur was going to take me a long way away and, at the same time, she didn’t doubt, I’m equally sure, that, give or take a little, I was capable of looking after myself. Consequently, she offered on Monday, Wash Day, to launder and iron his clothes, and Ken bought her a bottle of Dubonnet.
    I accompanied Ken to bars, and, although I was under age, nobody ever objected. Not on account of my size or looks, but on account of my certainty. Don’t look back, he told me, don’t doubt for a moment, just be surer of yourself than they are.
    Once, another drinker started swearing at me – telling me to get my bloody mouth out of his sight – and I suddenly broke down. Ken put his arm round me and took me straight out into the street. There were no lights. This was in wartime London. We walked a long way in silence. If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can’t help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during! Remember this. Unless you’re with those who love you, only those who love you, and in that case