‘His name was Emile,’ Agnes went on. ‘He was born the twenty-seventh of April 1939. Just over a year before those bastards invaded.’ She leaned to one side, rummaging in the pocket of her dress. ‘This is all I have of him.’ She opened a small square photograph and slid it along the table for Dora to see. The celluloid was cracked in the middle along the folds, but Dora could make out Agnes holding a small child with blond curly hair. She looked at Agnes, at her worn face, her cracked and missing teeth, her thinning, colourless hair.
‘I fought like a tigress,’ Agnes went on. ‘When they snatched him. That’s how I lost my teeth. Bam in the kisser with the flat end of a rifle. What they didn’t knock out turned bad. Killed the roots, see.’
The baby could have been any baby, but the timbre of Agnes’s words suggested she was telling the truth. Agnes may have been many things, but she wasn’t a liar.
‘I was never a beauty,’ Agnes said. ‘But this turned me ugly and old. I don’t care. I live to get him back again.’
‘Who took him?’
Agnes looked over her shoulder. The guard was slouching by the doorway, picking at his hand. Dora hawked, spat, an ugly glob of green phlegm.
‘Himmler,’ she said.
Himmler. She could hear Hoffmann simpering Himmler, as if he was a matinee idol. Even List held the name in awe.
‘Himmler?’ Dora repeated.
‘Well,’ Agnes said, ‘technically, a henchman.’
‘What for?’
‘For his experiment. His programme.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Dora said.
‘Breeding. Like cows. Or mice. Breeding fucking mice.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Dora said. ‘What mice?’
‘Are you thick, or something?’ Agnes raised her voice, but no one noticed. She leant into Dora again, her lips and foul breath close to Dora’s ear. ‘Breeding the master race. Pure Aryans. Why d’you think List didn’t have to use protection, like all the other pillocks who pissed our way? Why d’you think you were given special treatment?’
Dora swallowed, shook her head. This was too much to take in. Agnes scraped the spoon around the sides of the bowl, scratching at the last morsel of food.
‘You were picked,’ she went on. ‘That was what I was told. Certificated Aryan. I heard rumours, mind, that you were a yid, in disguise. And I thought to myself, good on yer. I’d never have known.’
She picked up the photograph, lifted it to her lips, then folded it carefully and put it back in her pocket.
‘You were singled out to breed. With the Hauptsturmführer. The SS. A perfect little baby. They made sure you had proper food. I saw you, up in the Revier. Milk and all. Taken off whoring duties. Just in case one of the other morons contaminated you. See, I kept my eyes open.’
Agnes was right about that. But it was because List cared for her, loved her. Protected her.
‘You think you’re special, don’t you?’ Agnes went on, as if reading Dora’s mind. ‘Well, I’ve got news for you. You weren’t the first, and if the Kommandant hadn’t blotted his copybook, you wouldn’t have been his last.’
‘No.’ Dora couldn’t help herself. ‘He cares.’
‘Pah,’ Agnes said. ‘They’re ruthless, these bastards.’ She pulled out the photograph again. ‘I had this rolled up my arse when they took me in,’ she said. ‘They never thought of looking there. Not that orifice.’ She winked. ‘You need your wits about you to out-do this lot.’ She looked at Dora. ‘You let your guard drop. Fell for the cheap glamour of power. Made sense for a while, got you favours. But it’s crunch time now.’
She nodded, her dirty hair falling forward on her face. She lifted her hand, yanked it behind her ear.
‘They snatched my baby. Took the fair-haired ones to give to families of the SS. Your baby’s no different. Hoffmann’s taking it to France, the moment it’s born.’ Agnes breathed in deep so her throat rattled. ‘God help you then.’
Dora sat toying with her spoon, trying to understand what Agnes was saying. What she said made sense of the meeting with List and Hoffmann. And yet, Dora thought, Agnes hadn’t been there in their private intimate moments. List was proud of his baby, was going to take Dora with him to Alderney. He wasn’t a liar.
‘I wasn’t a whore, you know, before I came here,’ Agnes went on. ‘And when I leave, if I’m spared, and I will be spared, I’ll see to that, I won’t be one either.’
‘Your husband?’ Dora said. ‘Couldn’t he help?’
Agnes smiled, a crooked twist of her mouth. ‘I didn’t say I was an angel,’ she said.
‘Why France?’
‘Himmler’s opened this new facility, in Lamorlaye. Lebensborn. Mother and baby home. Mainly baby. And not for mothers like you.’
‘Or you?’
‘Certainly not for me,’ Agnes said. ‘They brought me here. July 1940.’ She opened the photograph, closed it again. ‘I saw what the set-up was here and I said to myself, I said, I can play them at their game. Because I will survive. Sometimes, looks pay.’ She threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘Who’d want to screw me? I made sure they made me a Kapo. Keep on their right side, I said to myself. Keep alive. Because as soon as this war is over, so help me God, I’m out of here and searching for Emile.’
Dora had never liked the woman, but she’d never tried to find out about her, either. Bitter men, her father used to say, have drunk poison. She believed Agnes. But List? She wasn’t sure that fitted.
‘Nurse Hoffmann,’ Dora said.
‘What about her?’ Agnes said. ‘In it up to her neck.’
‘And List?’
Agnes laughed, a genuine mirth, a rumble from the deep. ‘You’re bloody thick, you are,’ she said. ‘She’s totally infatuated with him. Would kill you happily to get at him. She wants that baby. Her gift to him, if you like.’
Dora thought of their last conversation with Hoffmann. Sly, treacherous. Even if Agnes was wrong about List, she knew she was right about Nurse Hoffmann.
‘What can I do?’ Dora said.
‘You’re the nurse,’ Agnes said. ‘You’ll know what to do, when the time comes.’
She folded the photograph again and tucked it into her pocket, climbed off the bench, lifted her bowl and wiped it with the hem of her shift.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JOE
Jersey: June 1985
Geoffrey was resting. He’d taken to having a nap of late, climbing the stairs and lying down under the eiderdown. Joe had offered to bring his bed downstairs.
‘We never use the front room,’ he said. ‘Why not make it into your bedroom? You’d have the bathroom on the same level.’
If the truth were to be told, Joe knew he would feel happier if Geoffrey slept there. He was becoming more unsteady, as if his deafness had taken a turn for the worse and disrupted his balance. He was forgetful, too, confused. He’d called Joe ‘Pierre’ the other day, had put his reading glasses in the fridge. His bad leg was now stiff with arthritis and the doctor said it put wear and tear on his other joints, that he should have a new hip in due course, a new knee.
‘Spare parts,’ Joe said. ‘You’ll keep running forever.’
‘I’m not a car,’ Geoffrey said. His face had clouded and his eyes grew watery. ‘I just want to run long enough for Dora. Not forever.’
Joe could hear him snoring in the room above. He should go out, take the bike for a spin. Why not search for the old labour camps, buried now under golf courses and luxury flats? Lay a wreath, perhaps. Make atonement. If they were to ask him what he’d done with his life, he could say, I honoured the dead and paid for my sins.
Joe could hear a car change gears, begin the descent to the farm. A cheap rented car. That woman. Joe braced himself. She’d ask him about Trude this time. He didn’t want to set that memory free, but it had already escaped. Joe may have lived like an imposter, a quack priest peddling forgiveness and hope, but he’d never lied outright in his life, couldn’t start now
. He’d have to tell the truth. Besides, she might have news about Dora, and that was important for Geoffrey.
He pushed back his chair and went outside. She’d parked in front of the house, was walking up to the front door.
‘Come round the back,’ he said ‘We stopped using that door after the war.’ He and Geoffrey had not spoken about it, but they couldn’t cross that threshold again, not after the lad had been shot. Joe swept it from time to time, kept it clear, Weedol between the cracks of the paving stones, but they never walked across it, not to go in and out of the house. She was wearing jeans, with a red blouse and white jacket. Joe had always thought it strange that jeans were fashionable, but the young woman looked good in hers, and as she rounded the corner of the house, the sun glinted on her black hair, turned it red. It did that, he knew, made ravens blue, crows green, blackbirds amber, depending on the angle of the sun and the time of year. Black was the richest colour he knew.
He opened the door, stood back as she entered the kitchen.
‘It’s warm in here,’ she said.
‘Well, see, it’s the Aga,’ he said. ‘We keep it going all year.’
He pulled out a chair from the table and pointed for her to sit. He should take her into the front room, but they never used it these days, never had guests, and over the years it had become a storeroom, full of newspapers to be read one day and broken chairs to be mended. Joe would have to clear it out before he could turn it into a bedroom for Geoffrey, but in the meantime, it did no harm.
‘I hope you don’t mind the kitchen,’ Joe said. His mother, now, she would never let a stranger in her kitchen, would only ever use the front room.
‘This is fine,’ Barbara said. ‘Homely.’
‘You’re persistent,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll give you that. Coming back again.’
‘I’m on a quest.’ She smiled.
He stood with his back to the Aga. It made him feel big, brave, to stand and not to sit with her, at her level. ‘So it seems.’ He added, ‘Are you any further finding Dora?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I may have found her.’
‘And?’
Barbara shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She hasn’t been helpful. She said the woman in the photograph wasn’t her and she said she didn’t know who you were.’
‘Then why are you so sure?’
‘I have a hunch.’
No, Joe thought, that’s not good enough, not for Geoffrey.
‘You see,’ Barbara said, ‘she seemed to know the old man who lives here. It quite agitated her. And though she denied it, I’m pretty sure she recognised the woman in the photo. I don’t know what any of this means.’
‘Has she not talked to you about anything?’ Joe said.
Barbara shook her head. ‘What is there to tell me?’
‘Everything,’ Joe said. ‘Everything.’
‘I am sure I have upset her.’
‘You’ve upset us all,’ Joe said.
‘It’s so difficult, to talk about what happened.’
‘It is that,’ Joe said. ‘That it is.’
‘I sent you a photograph,’ she said.
‘You did.’
‘Did you know her? She was a nurse.’ Barbara leaned forward, her blouse briefly gaping open, showing a white, lacy brassiere. She wriggled free of her jacket and draped it on the back of the chair. ‘She was my mother.’
Joe leant against the Aga and stared at the young woman in front of him. She didn’t have Trude’s physique, although she was a brunette, had her mother’s colouring. He knew there were children who bore no resemblance to their parents. He’d known families where some were short and stout and others tall and lanky, same mother and father, or others where the children had blue eyes and the parents brown. It was just the way the genes and chromosomes toppled, some to the father’s side, some to the mother’s, some with too few bits and pieces in their make-up, some with too many. Oh, he’d seen his fair share of those.
‘Mother?’ Joe’s voice quavered, made him sound as if he was fourteen. He stood staring at her, until she looked away. ‘Tell me, now,’ Joe said. ‘Is your mother still alive?’ He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, his feelings tumbling and somersaulting.
‘No,’ Barbara said. ‘She died a few months ago.’
‘Oh,’ Joe said, as a wave of grief passed over him, and relief, too. Added, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And your father,’ he said, his heart quickening once more, ta-tum, ta-tum. ‘Who might he be?’
‘He died in the war,’ she said. ‘Or so my mother said.’
‘You never knew him?’
She shook her head.
Joe moved towards the table, pulled out a chair and sat opposite her.
‘Did you know her?’ Barbara asked.
Joe stood up again, walked behind her and stood by the sink, looking out across the yard to the cowshed beyond. ‘I did,’ he said, added, ‘I loved her once.’
He heard her spin in her chair, push it back and walk up to him, leaning her face into his. ‘You loved her?’
‘Is that such a strange idea?’ Joe said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That was tactless. It’s just–’ she hesitated and Joe waited. ‘It’s just I thought she was in love with another man.’
‘Your father?’ Joe said.
‘I don’t know if he was,’ Barbara said. ‘This is my quest, as you put it.’
‘Then who is this other man?’
Joe knew the answer before she said it.
‘He’s called Maximilian List,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of him? I have a photograph of him too.’
Joe said nothing.
‘But now you tell me that you also loved her.’
‘I did that, yes.’ He almost said, And she loved me, because that hope still smouldered in the deep of his dreams, unrecognised.
‘You see,’ Barbara said, ‘List’s wife said that my mother was infatuated with him and now I wonder whether they had an affair, or whether my mother was imagining it. And now you tell me that you–’
She walked back to the table and sat down. She was looking at him, and he her.
He pondered for a moment. ‘And when did you say you were born?’
‘I didn’t. But my birthday is the twenty-fourth of February, 1944.’
Joe calculated. He hadn’t thought Trude would get pregnant. What had she said? Don’t worry. He hadn’t given it another thought, hadn’t wanted to give it a thought, that Trude would do unspeakable things, like those wicked girls with a tot of gin and a bicycle spoke. But here was her daughter. Their daughter.
He had been a bachelor all his life, had never dreamed he could be a father, was a father. He felt the blood rush to his face, colour his neck and cheeks, flushing like a middle-aged woman. A daughter. He rolled the word round. A child. His child. He looked up, at a loss for words, willing her to ask, Could you be my father? He’d find the words then, soon enough.
He felt nothing for this woman. Wouldn’t a father feel love? He couldn’t stop studying her, could see it made her uncomfortable, but she had an Irish complexion, that would be for sure, plenty of black-haired colleens with skin as white as porcelain, and hadn’t he thought there was something familiar about the way she looked and carried herself? She didn’t take after little Bridey, or any of the men, for they were small and wiry like himself, but didn’t he have some great-aunts in Kerry who were tall and slender? Strong as oxen, mind. It happened, that a likeness skipped a generation, or two or three.
He’d grow to love her. And she him. Make up for those lost years, those little things that meant so much. Teaching her how to tie a shoelace, blow her nose. Things that fathers taught. And Irish dancing. Oh, she would have been champion.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. She reached for her bag, hoisted it onto her lap. ‘Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’
Joe had stopped smoking after the war, but he understood its grip. ‘I’ll fetch an ashtray,’ he said, walking to the dres
ser and taking down the chipped saucer he used for Pierre.
When she asked, Why don’t I have a daidí? What was my daidí like? What did Trude tell her? What lies? She was capable of anything, Joe knew. Did she ever show remorse? For Joe surely felt it now. He would never have abandoned his child.
He placed the saucer on the table.
‘Thank you.’ Barbara was frowning. She was tongue-tied too, Joe realised. The shock of it all.
He would have been the happiest man, had he known. Had it been possible to know. He’d have cherished the little babaí. Still could. They’d work it out, he and Barbara.
But what if she rejected him? He’d heard the disbelief in her voice, the disappointment that he had been her mother’s lover. He could feel his old anxieties swim to the surface, only he couldn’t put a name to them, not now.
He opened the window. Perhaps Trude had loved him, just a little.
‘Can we go for a walk?’ she said, finishing her cigarette and scrunching it into the saucer. ‘Along the shore? You can tell me everything.’
That I can, he thought. That I can.
Barbara had taken off her shoes and was walking barefoot, straying into the lapping water, watching her feet sink into the wet sand.
‘There’s no birds,’ she said. ‘Where are the gulls?’
Joe could spot them right enough, crouching on the branches of the wind-bleached spinney that reached to the shore, silent as corpses. ‘They’ve taken cover,’ he said. ‘A storm’s due.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘That’s the beauty of them,’ Joe said. ‘They’re more sensitive than we are. They sense any change in barometric pressure. Look,’ he pointed at a hawk in the distance. ‘That bird is usually high in the sky. But he’s flying low today.’
‘My mother used to tell me stuff like that,’ Barbara said. ‘She knew a lot about birds.’
Had Trude thought of him, perhaps, when she talked about the birds with Barbara? Did she see Joe in her mind’s eye? Listen, look, standing behind her with his hand on the binoculars, training them into her sight, smelling her hair and the faint odour of her body, knowing her flesh was soft and yielding. Or was it List she had conjured up?
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