The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

‘Who would believe me?’ Joe said. His own daidí didn’t, had floored Joe instead. ‘He was a priest. Like God himself.’ He lay still on the blanket, blinking at the sun in his eyes, listening to Trude’s gentle breath and the rustle of the breeze in the fronds. ‘Boxing saved me,’ he said, though his voice was low. ‘And the birds. Deadened the pain. Lifted me above it.’

  Trude reached over again and trailed her fingers on his lips. ‘Do you like me to touch you?’

  Light and soft. Enough to break Joe from his thoughts. He should push her fingers away, get up and leave. This could cost him his immortal soul. But Trude understood him, shared his secret now, carried his pain too. She must love him, and wasn’t that what it was all about? Could a priest not love?

  She leaned close. Sitting in the dell, smothered by the emptiness of the sky, Joe didn’t know how it happened, but there was her tongue, and his. She was on top of him now, her cotton dress up around her waist as she opened the buttons on his trousers with clumsy hands and sticky fingers.

  He was shaking, soft as jelly. Had never experienced such a grand sensation before. Had they made love? It didn’t seem like such a sin. It had all happened so fast. She lay on him, and he coupled his arms around her, held her close. Grafted together.

  ‘Are you happy, Joe?’ She had never called him Joe before. It was a new step, a new era.

  ‘Troubled.’ His vows lay in tatters. ‘This can’t go on.’ He wanted to say, Will you marry me, Trude? Were they not as one now, in holy union? Forever.

  ‘Troubled?’

  He’d have to leave the priesthood. Muster the courage. Get a job. Give her a home.

  ‘I have made you whole again,’ she said. ‘A proper man.’ She rolled away, lay on her side, one arm over his waist. ‘That must be good.’

  A proper man? Was that a dreadful thing? Was that what he needed, to drive it all out?

  ‘What if you are pregnant?’ Joe hadn’t thought of that, not when it was happening.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘No?’ Joe said.

  ‘Oh Father O’Cleary,’ she was laughing. ‘You know nothing.’

  She pushed herself away from him, stood and held out her hands to pull him up. ‘I have to go. Thank you, Joe.’

  She kissed him on the lips. Bent down, picked up the blanket, shook it free of earth and grass and folded it with the deft movements of a practised nurse.

  ‘Can’t you stay?’ She was the only person he had ever told his secret to and he wanted her to be with him until it settled down and was back in its place. She was the only person he had ever truly loved, been close to. The only woman he had kissed, caressed, done this with, had intimacy with.

  But she was shaking her head. ‘I have to get back,’ she said. ‘It’s best we aren’t seen together.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why now?’ They’d cycled freely together before.

  Trude hesitated. ‘I found a note, in my basket,’ she said. ‘It made fun of Hitler. It was signed “the soldier with no name”.’ She pulled a face. ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘No,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid.’

  ‘If they see me with you, they may think it was you who put it there.’

  Joe didn’t understand the logic of that, but it was a reminder. They were at war.

  ‘Stay here,’ Trude said. ‘Give me half an hour, to get away.’

  He watched as she weaved her way through the oats, a small podgy figure in a poppy dress with short brown hair. He felt a surge of sadness, as if his skin had been peeled back, exposing him, defenceless, to the world. He started to run. He had to talk to her.

  ‘Trude!’

  She dropped out of view, and he heard the gate shut.

  ‘Trude.’ He sat down in the field, held his knees tight close to his chin, rocked from side to side. He shut his eyes, the poppies of her dress floating around him like petals on the feast of the Visitation. He knew he would have to choose. Please God, he found himself saying, let me be wise and brave.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DORA

  London: June 1985

  Half of her wanted nothing to do with Barbara Hummel again. The other half wanted to know who she was, how she’d come by the photos, what she wanted with Dora. The meeting in the café by the British Museum had churned up memories, even though she hadn’t told Barbara a thing, and they hissed and squirmed like the serpent himself, tempting her to find out more, your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

  She didn’t have the woman’s address. Well, Dora reasoned, if she makes contact again, then she might agree to see her. If not, so be it. At least now she was aware, and if the woman was a con artist, she’d be on her guard. She couldn’t sleep. She’d taken to double-checking the lock on the doors again before she went to bed, lay counting the hours, her head swimming and sweating. Don’t fight insomnia, Doralein. She could hear Uncle Otto’s voice as he soothed her each night in those early days. It fights back. She’d had to go to the doctor. They didn’t give out barbiturates anymore. There was this new stuff, Valium. The demons only came at night, she said, and she needed to be in a deep, dreamless sleep when they visited.

  A letter came two weeks later.

  I am so sorry if my questions disturbed you and I won’t bother you again. If, however, you change your mind, and wish to get in touch with me I am staying with friends in Richmond and can be contacted at the above address and telephone number. I will be in the United Kingdom for the summer, on and off, travelling mainly between London and Jersey.

  Dora rang the number after breakfast.

  Barbara Hummel was standing on the doorstep holding a large bunch of lilies in one hand and a carrier bag in the other. It was a hot June day and the sun was high in a cloudless sky. Dora felt better disposed towards her, now she was meeting her on her own terms. She was good-looking, Dora could see that. Tall and dark-haired with a smooth, freckled skin, elegant in a simple white dress with a mandarin collar, and blue sandals, nails painted a deep, dark red. Dora envied her that. Gardening put paid to any notions of a manicure. Or a pedicure, come to think of it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dora said, taking the flowers, beckoning Barbara in and closing the door behind her.

  ‘I thought you would also like this.’ Barbara handed her the bag.

  Dora peered inside. White asparagus. She breathed in, a sharp, excited hah. She hadn’t tasted white asparagus since before the war. ‘Thank you,’ Dora said. ‘Let me take it to the kitchen. Come, follow me.’

  She had knocked through the front and rear rooms after Uncle Otto died, made a new kitchen at the back overlooking her garden. She placed the asparagus on the draining board and reached for a vase, putting it in the sink and turning on the water.

  ‘May I ask you a personal question?’ Barbara Hummel said. ‘Are you German, by any chance?’

  Dora pulled the lower leaves off the lilies. ‘Why do you think that?’ she said. ‘Is it relevant?’

  They were getting off to a bad start again, as if those memory demons were sitting on her shoulder egging her on. Be nasty, make her unwelcome. Dora took a breath. No need to answer the question.

  ‘I heard your accent–’ said Barbara.

  ‘I didn’t think I had an accent anymore,’ Dora said.

  ‘It takes a German to know a German. When was the last time you spoke your own language?’

  ‘English is my own language now.’ She lived in English, thought and dreamed in it. ‘I haven’t spoken German for many years.’ Not since before the war, apart from the odd endearment with Uncle Otto and the occasional phrase with Charles. ‘Maybe I have forgotten I used to be German.’ She tried to smile.

  ‘Then we’ll speak in English. I’m a translator. Pretty much bilingual.’

  Dora nodded. She didn’t care what this Barbara woman did for a living but understood she was trying to make Dora relaxed. Start again.

  ‘Thank you for the asparagus,’ she said. ‘Der Spargel. I haven’t had
that since I was a child. I shall look forward to it.’ She placed the lilies in the vase and held it to her. ‘My father and I would make a meal of asparagus when it was in season. With melted butter and salt and pepper. New potatoes.’

  ‘Nice food memories,’ Barbara said. ‘Like Proust.’

  ‘My father used to say it was the food of angels.’ Stick with food, Dora thought, it’s neutral, safe.

  ‘My mother said something similar,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Was she nice, your mother?’

  Barbara’s smile faded and it was a while before she spoke again. Says it all, Dora thought. She had touched a nerve.

  ‘To be honest,’ Barbara said, ‘I didn’t get on with her. I couldn’t wait to leave home. Perhaps that’s why I studied languages, to be sure of getting away. What about your mother?’

  ‘I never knew her,’ Dora said. ‘She died when I was born. My father mothered me, and I adored him.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Barbara said.

  ‘I think so,’ Dora said. How had they moved to sharing such intimacies? She nodded towards the asparagus. ‘You can’t buy this in England. Only the insipid green varieties that the English prefer. Where did you find it?’

  ‘My friend teaches at the German School in Richmond,’ Barbara said. She said it in German, Deutsche Schule. ‘Her mother lives in Hanover and brought some over.’

  Dora entered the sitting room and put the vase on the coffee table. She indicated the sofa, Please make yourself comfortable, and sat in the chair opposite, the one she used every evening to read or watch television. The sun showed up the motes of dust in the air. The armrests, Dora noted, were grubby.

  ‘And you?’ Dora said. ‘Where were you brought up?’

  ‘In Hamburg,’ Barbara said.

  ‘That was bombed, was it not? Like London.’

  Barbara nodded. There was a stiffening in the atmosphere. Uncle Otto had a friend, a German like himself, Jewish, a businessman, who’d returned to Germany after the war, working for the British, taking stock of the industry that had survived. They’d listened to his stories, the flattening of Hamburg.

  ‘What was it like?’ Dora said. ‘Growing up there after the war?’

  Barbara laughed. ‘I didn’t know any different,’ she said. ‘We played in the bombsites, can you believe? We were told not to pick up anything metal. I was a sickly baby, my mother said. She said she couldn’t feed me properly, I didn’t thrive. She sold a silver bangle to pay for photos of me, in case I didn’t make it, so she could remember me.’ Her face grew serious and she paused, running her finger in the seam of the piping of the armrest. Dora was about to ask her to stop doing that, when Barbara looked up and began again.

  ‘We didn’t always have enough to eat,’ she went on. ‘So I was often hungry. I shared my mother’s bed for years, and we shared an apartment with another family. I was about seven when we got our own place. That’s when I started school. The afternoon shift. It fitted with my mother’s work. My mother talked about the bombing, but of course, I don’t remember that. I wasn’t born. Why do you ask?’ She paused. ‘You never went back to Germany after the war?’

  There was no guile in Barbara’s face. Of course. She assumed Dora had been in Jersey with the occupiers, that she was German. She could lie again. Actually, I’m Swedish. She didn’t have the energy. And why? She wouldn’t fool Barbara.

  ‘No,’ Dora said. She would give nothing away. ‘I chose to stay.’ She pulled the cushion from behind her, pummelled the feather stuffing into shape, tucked it into the small of her back.

  ‘This is a nice room,’ Barbara said.

  ‘It has memories.’

  Uncle Otto’s old medical books were still on the bookshelves, his Kienzle clock on the mantelpiece. He’d only brought what he could carry with him when he left Germany and although the clock no longer worked, it was a reminder of his house in Dresden, along with the Bauhaus rug which he’d rolled up and carried under his arm. Of course, Barbara would be noting all of it.

  ‘Tell me,’ Dora said. ‘Why were you so anxious to meet me? You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘After my mother died,’ Barbara said, ‘I found the photographs. I didn’t know why she had never shown me them. She never talked about the war.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why,’ Dora said. ‘It was difficult, for that generation.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Barbara said. ‘But it set me thinking. I knew my mother had been a nurse in the war. She told me she never left Germany. Seeing those photographs, taken in Jersey, made me curious. Then suspicious.’ She paused, added, ‘I think she lied.’

  Dora wished she’d listened to her cautious half, have nothing to do with this woman again. Barbara was rubbing memories, stirring their genie, and they were rushing out too fast.

  ‘So I went there, to try and find out,’ Barbara was saying. ‘Silly, I know. But it mattered to me in a way I can’t explain. I’m sorry.’ She sniffed, delved into her handbag for a tissue. She is persistent, Dora thought, consistent too. But she was warming to this younger woman, less inclined to think ill of her.

  ‘It would be provocative to have put the photo of the SS officer in the paper,’ Barbara went on. ‘But the photograph I showed you was of a woman not in uniform. It wasn’t obvious that she was German. Of course, she could have been someone’s wife or mistress, but I thought I’d risk it. When I heard you were a nurse too, I wondered if perhaps you knew my mother, or recognised the woman, or the officer. Especially after I heard your accent.’

  Dora smiled, tempted to say, I was on the British side, not the Germans. No, she told herself, keep your counsel, for the time being.

  ‘I believe my mother was in Jersey during the war,’ Barbara went on. ‘I just don’t understand why she lied to me.’

  She wasn’t the first German to lie after the war, Dora thought.

  ‘May I show you one more photograph, please?’ She produced an envelope from her bag and passed it to Dora.

  ‘I need my glasses,’ Dora said. She could feel the blood draining from her face. Fight or flight. She knew she didn’t want to see this new photograph. ‘And light.’ She took the picture to the kitchen window and stood with her back to Barbara.

  Nurse Hoffmann, in the uniform of the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz, the German Red Cross, arm in arm with Maximilian List. Dora put her hands to her mouth, stifled a cry. Had she given herself away?

  Dora didn’t hear Barbara walk up behind her and jumped as Barbara placed her hand on Dora’s arm.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Do you know her?’

  Dora stared at the photo again. Compose yourself. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Dora shrugged. ‘I may have seen her. In a general way. You know, out and about. We’d often see German nurses in their uniforms. But I didn’t know her.’

  Barbara took the photograph from Dora and studied it. ‘You see, this woman was my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’ Dora had no idea what to say. She thought she’d heard the last of Hoffmann long ago, and now her daughter was standing in front of her. Barbara didn’t look anything like her mother, that was for sure. A relief, too.

  ‘I believe the man is Maximilian List,’ Barbara said.

  Dora swallowed. ‘And why did you think I may know him?’

  ‘Just because your photo and his, the studio shot of him, were together, in that box. You know,’ Barbara said. She leaned forward, narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m not really interested in you. I should have made that clear. But I am interested in him.’

  ‘Why?’ Dora said. She didn’t want to know or be reminded of that man, but she needed time to think. She walked back into the sitting room and Barbara followed, sitting on the sofa with her, sideways on. Her face looked different from this angle, oblique, like an Auerbach painting, Dora thought.

  ‘He was in the SS,’ Barbara was saying. ‘He was the commandant of Lager Sylt, on Alderney, the concentration camp
.’ She paused. Dora knew she was studying her closely. ‘Sylt was a subsidiary of Neuengamme, and he’d been a captain there.’

  ‘But if you know who he is, what more do you want to know from me?’

  Barbara paused, shifted on the sofa, tucking down her skirt as she did so. ‘I think he may be my father.’

  Dora looked away, stood up. ‘Let me make some coffee.’ She walked into the kitchen. ‘How could I help you answer that?’ she said, over her shoulder, filling the kettle, hands shaking as she rummaged for the coffee in the cupboard to the left of the sink. ‘Wouldn’t your mother know?’

  ‘I can’t ask her now,’ Barbara said. Her mother was dead, of course. That was a tactless thing to say. Still, Dora thought, good riddance.

  ‘My mother said my father had been killed in the war,’ Barbara said. ‘She said he was in the Wehrmacht, a foot soldier, caught up in it all. Never a Nazi.’ She paused, and Dora saw her smile. ‘There were never any Nazis in Germany, not after the war.’

  Barbara took a deep breath, got up from the sofa and followed Dora into the kitchen.

  ‘My father’s name was Detlef Hummel,’ she said.’ I never questioned her. It had been a whirlwind romance, my mother said. That sort of thing happened in the war. She was widowed before I was even born.’

  ‘But you saw photographs of him?’ Dora said. ‘Surely?’

  ‘She had no photos. She said they were lost in the turmoil.’

  ‘Does he not have family?’

  ‘They live behind the Iron Curtain. We couldn’t visit, couldn’t write. Still can’t. I accepted that.’

  ‘That all sounds very possible,’ Dora said. ‘Why do you doubt it?’

  ‘Woman’s intuition.’ Barbara leaned on the sink, looked out of the window. ‘You have a beautiful garden,’ she said. ‘Do you do it all yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dora said. ‘It’s hard work.’

  ‘I’d love a garden. But I live in an apartment. I can only admire from afar, sow seeds in my head.’

  ‘You could have a window box.’

  ‘I do. And houseplants. But it’s not the same.’ She turned round and smiled. ‘I envy you.’