For all that, I am still Elsa, she thought. It’s not such a great adventure, surely, even today, to run an errand in my own city. To fold back the shutters for once. No one met her eye as she turned the corner of Adlerstrasse. That was good, she thought. No one held his nose as she passed, either. She might, if all was well, make it to Herr Goldmann’s shop without catching a spray of spittle on her sleeve.
The blinds were down when she got there, the awning in and the door pulled to. No broken windows, though. Nothing daubed on the front. That was also good, she thought. But no sign of life either. She was about to give up when she heard the creak of a sash somewhere above her head. Inside, the shop smelt of dead things. He stood there, Herr Goldmann, his hands at his sides, palms cast downwards. He said nothing. Not a word. To break the silence and because she was, after all, still Elsa, she elaborated on the adventure, such as it was.
‘Some cotton, brown. For stockings. I’m always needing to darn my stockings. Sharp bones like all the Frankels. Aunt Frieda was forever putting her elbows through her cardigans.’
He shook his head and drew in a long wavering breath that seemed to steal something from the room. At the counter, he tugged at a narrow drawer that released itself in a rattle of spools.
Elsa trailed her fingers along the carefully graded colours until she lit on just the right shade of brown. Why not have purple, she thought suddenly, or yellow for that matter? Why pretend anymore that a brown stocking need remain brown when everything else has changed? She gathered up two handfuls of spools, bright as bridesmaids’ posies, and shoved them deep into her pockets. Herr Goldmann pushed away the few coins she gave him and asked instead that she bring him some bread, perhaps an egg or two if they had some. She babbled on as prettily as a Scarlatti sonata. ‘And jam. I’ll bring you jam. Mama still makes some from the berries in the garden.’
‘And jam, then,’ he said.
Outside, the sun still shone and the city gleamed and the crimson folds cascading from the buildings were almost beautiful. Even so, she hurried her step. Best get home before they welcome their little leader, before they grow glassy-eyed. She fixed her thoughts on the colours with which she would embroider her knees when all the stockings had worn through. That afternoon, she would scatter Scarlatti into the air in the house where no one said much anymore, where Papa sat motionless at his desk with papers strewn around him, as though the changes hadn’t happened, as though he was still the Professor.
Elsa could hardly remember the days when he was self-assured and surrounded by friends. Nowadays, he wasn’t even permitted to paint.
‘Degenerate,’ they said, ‘that art of yours.’ So Papa’s life’s work was dismissed at a click of the Direktor’s fingers. They stuck him at the back of some office where he didn’t officially exist and paid him enough to feed the cat.
Elsa turned the corner of Schillerstrasse, where all the flower boxes were red and white. Geraniums. Just red and white. She wondered when they would cultivate a black one to celebrate all that they had ruined. The sun was in her eyes now and for a moment she felt less sure of her way. The crowds out early on the streets today seemed to blur the city’s contours.
She almost collided with a man standing in the centre of the pavement, watching his little dog relieve itself against a tree. She kept her eyes down, her fingers rumbling through the spools of thread in her pockets, her shoulders braced away from him. His voice came out of the haze of sunshine high above her,
‘Ah, but if it isn’t little Miss Frankel.’
She squinted but even as his face took shape, she didn’t recognise him. Once upon a time it wouldn’t have mattered that the Professor had to introduce himself. After all, she’d only met him a couple of times, when he was a junior lecturer in Papa’s faculty and she was young enough to be tweaked under the chin. Nowadays, though, Papa talked constantly of the Professor. For Papa, he was a giant; a man who held the power to crush them all but who had decided instead to show kindness.
Elsa shielded her eyes against the sun as she felt the little dog weave its way around her ankles. He asked about her music, did she still play? And her Mutti, how was she these days? When the questions came to an end, she left a respectful gap, then wished him a good day, such as it was.
‘What a fine man your father is,’ he said then. She smiled, tried to make herself pleasant. ‘People complain so. I mean, I don’t blame the man. He wasn’t educated to be a clerk.’ He gave a dry little laugh and wiped his lips with a crumpled handkerchief. ‘Come and take coffee with me,’ he said. ‘Such a glorious morning to talk of dear old Papa.’
She didn’t drink coffee, so perhaps that was why she hesitated, or maybe it was the gaggle of Austrians in national dress, with their sharp accents, who came a little too close.
‘Your father would want you to help him, Fraulein.’ He pronounced the word elaborately, extravagantly. It gave her hope and so she went with him. The Professor strode on in front of her, his little dog leading the way, the lead pulled taut.
As she walked, she began to feel a little brighter. Perhaps the Professor had more interesting work for Papa. Some research, perhaps. Anything other than bookkeeping. Then, when they had passed two cafés, she began to wonder why neither would do. He turned around as though he had read her mind but perhaps also to make sure she was still there. ‘My rooms are on Genferplatz,’ he said.
The Professor stood back and let her climb the narrow staircase ahead of him. As she walked slowly up the stairs, she heard the little dog scramble through a doorway and out the back. The building was hushed, confident. It was the silence of those who speak only when they wish. She would have liked the little dog to stay.
Papa always said it was the key to a man, what he chose to display of himself on his walls. She was astonished by the Professor’s walls. They were covered in watery sunsets and bowls of fruit that had never seen a tree. It made her feel at once superior and puzzled that a Professor of Fine Art at the university could have such cautious, uneducated tastes.
He entered the room behind her. As he clicked the door shut, she heard him turn the key. There was no more talk of coffee. He pointed at the couch and indicated where she was to sit. He pulled over a chair that scraped on the polished floor. He sat opposite her – too close – his legs almost touching hers. For the first time, she had a chance to evaluate further this Professor. She spotted the pin in his lapel. That was only to be expected, she supposed, but all the same it struck her that she’d never before been alone with a man who wore such a pin. She drew her legs in closer. She noted the long creases that joined nose to mouth, the faint milky blue of his eyes.
When she opened her mouth to babble as she always did when others were silent, he raised his hand sharply and a wisp of air passed across her face like the ghost of a blow. She flinched, then ran her fingers across the spools in her pocket, playing them like semiquavers. He could speak first if it mattered that much to him. She understood that, above all else, she must be humble, grateful for whatever he might offer. He was so close she could smell cake on his breath, sweet cream and coffee. Wary now, she covered her knees with her skirt, pulling it tightly, wrapping it under her thighs.
He cleared his throat, lowered his hand as though about to touch her, then drew it back again. Whether his disgust was at himself or at her, she couldn’t tell. A filmy moisture had settled on his upper lip and she had already half risen from the couch when he struck her in the face, hard and sharp. The force jerked her head to one side, forced her back onto the couch. Tears sprang to her eyes with the pain and shock of it. Still, he said nothing. When her eyes cleared, he was sitting in the same position, examining his raised hand as if it was something quite separate from the rest of him. As she scrambled up to make for the door, drawing her coat tight around her, he moved quicker still.
‘Sit,’ he said, as if she were the little dog downstairs. He held her chin tight between index finger and thumb; examined one side of her face then the other. When he s
tarted to speak, it was as though he was talking to himself. That was what frightened her most. She tried to shake off his grip but he held her firm. ‘He was the devil’s own twin when he was in my shoes. Pull your socks up, Weber. Most irregular, Weber. Most inaccurate. Most out of order. He loved to lord it over me, your old Papa. Even now he forgets himself sometimes. Can you believe that? Even now.’
She wanted to cry but she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t cry for him.
‘You want to know why he’s still there, incompetent, pathetic, bumbling over those figures?’ She turned away from him, biting her lip. ‘Because it gives me pleasure. That’s why. Because he is learning humility.’
He was matter-of-fact when it came to undressing her. He stood at arm’s length, like a doctor. He took care to undo each button, to avoid ripping anything. At school, she had always hidden from others the birthmark that stained her left breast like a swirl of purple ink, avoided swimming with anyone but Oskar, worn blouses that reached the neck. He could look at that, if it made him merciful. All the same, she couldn’t stop her shoulders from curling inward, her knees from clamping together. She tried so hard not to shake, not to be sick, not to show anything of what she felt.
She concentrated on a vase of delphiniums on the table behind him; tucked herself inside the bell of one of the flowers. She managed to stay there a moment but the air from the open window was like another assault and she was too afraid not to watch him, to be prepared. And so she watched. The Professor’s mouth was gaping, his eyes slurred, his hand working furiously at his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice her move a step or two back from him, and she realised that she had seen that look before. A painting, she thought, one of their saints, someone who believed he’d seen God. He didn’t try to touch her. It was as though her shame was enough for him. Sensing he was finished, she dived to find her clothes.
‘Not yet.’ Seated at his desk, he became the Professor again, his eyes clearer now, his pencil whispering on the paper on front of him. ‘Look up.’
Whilst she did raise her head a little, she looked at a sunset, not at him. Then she found the delphinium again as he took what he wanted from her and put it down on the paper.
When he had finished, he got up from the desk and, with his foot, edged the neat pile of clothes in her direction. ‘Out.’
She shoved on enough bits and pieces to be decent and bundled the rest into the pockets of her coat. She was almost at the door when he threw her the key.
Somehow she made it home, skirting the walls of the buildings, avoiding the strangers with beer already on their breath. She was desperate for Oskar but they always seemed to think up new ways of keeping him away. She conjured him up and had him kiss her eyes, her neck, the curve of her stomach, but it only made the longing worse. Oskar had always been there. As kids they’d ignored one another; Emmi was the one who used to slip through the connecting gate to share secrets and bonbons. Then, when the hate began to spread and the connecting gate was bricked up, they fell defiantly in love. He couldn’t stand the Hitler Jugend; he said it was all bullshit but that he’d do it if it meant they’d leave him alone. He was always so certain it would all blow over. Oskar: so blue-eyed and sure of himself and unafraid of everything. So different from her and careful with her and eager for her. Forever telling her she was the only thing that made it possible for him to live in this shithole of a city. If only she had Oskar, she could bear the rest of it.
In her room, she took out Herr Goldmann’s spools, rolling them around on her table until their colours became more real than the memory of the Professor. All afternoon she worked, stabbing fiercely at her clothing with a fine needle; reclaiming it, filling up the moth holes on her grey coat with little scribbles of orange, purple, pink. In the distance, they were playing their music now; strutting too, no doubt, for the little leader. She thought of the Professor and hoped that what he had taken would be enough. Papa was late that night. Mama busied herself straightening the pictures in the drawing room, wiping away the dust that Beate no longer chose to notice.
Next door, at the Müller house, guests had arrived. Arranged in the garden like new-grown shrubs, they clinked and drank and trilled happily. Of Oskar, there was no sign. It was when the garden was empty again, long after the last of the Party faithful had trailed past the house, some singing, others still bearing their torches, that Elsa heard Papa fumbling at the lock. Once inside, he slumped back against the door, his eyes closed, a package under his arm.
Mama tripped along the corridor like a little duck, her fists out from her sides. She knocked over a photograph from the hall table in her rush to get to him. Soon she had her hands on his waist and was guiding him into the drawing room from behind. He slumped into a chair. Beate appeared at the kitchen door, eyes cast up to her heaven, a shrug on her shoulders. Mama was kneeling at his feet, gently clapping his cheek with one hand as she held him steady with the other. ‘What have they done to you? Elsa, a cup of water. Hurry now.’
Elsa held the glass out at arm’s length to stop her hand from shaking. He didn’t take it, so she laid it on the table beside him. He held his head in his hands so all that could be seen of him was the fragile pink shell of his skull. He placed his hand over Mama’s. ‘I need to talk to Elsa,’ he said.
Mama looked hurt and Elsa could tell she was angry with her already. Even so, she shut the door behind her in her precise, quiet way.
‘You know we can’t afford to stand out.’ He shook his head slowly, laid the package on the table, then nudged it towards her.
The first thing she noticed was the colours. Forbidden colours: a skirl of harsh pink, a scream of green. Even on first sight, Elsa could see that the girl’s face was a version of her own. Older than she remembered it, thinner, with wary eyes. As she tried to make sense of the thick black lines of the girl’s body, she heard Papa gulp back his glass of water like a man returned from the desert. This Elsa was naked, her sharp knees set apart and between them something raw, red, secret. Across her concave chest a long purple gash seemed to open up her left breast.
She felt serene, because that wounded ghost of a thing wasn’t her. It wasn’t Elsa. She tried to tell Papa that the Professor had wanted to crush her but that he hadn’t dared. That this was the nearest he could get. That when the time came, none of them would dare. She opened her mouth to start explaining it all to him but he just shook his head. ‘No words, Elsa. They don’t matter now.’
When he had swallowed the last of the water he looked at her. ‘“After all, Frankel,” he said to me, “it is your kind of thing.”’
He sniffed, then wiped his nose with his sleeve. She was ashamed to notice that his fingernails were bitten, his cuff frayed. Her thoughts were like butterflies now, unaccustomed to the freedom she allowed them to find a way to sweep away Papa’s hurt.
‘“Surely you haven’t forgotten,” he said, “the merest whiff of turpentine and they’ll cart you off. Whatever you people do amongst yourselves, you live in our world now.” You people. That’s how he spoke to me, the Professor.’ His voice quavered. ‘“You say it’s not yours, Frankel, that of course you no longer paint, that if you did paint it would be anything but this. But it is your kind of art,” he said. “Between the two of us, it is your kind of thing. And it is undoubtedly your daughter, is it not?”’
Papa was rubbing his clenched fist along his leg and then he began to sob. ‘“Frankel,” he said, “teach your daughter to keep her clothes on and her legs closed. You people must live by our rules.”’
For an instant, she wondered which was worse for him, his own shame or hers. She bowed her head and felt for the spools that weren’t there.
He began to settle himself, with a deep breath he held for an eternity then released in one harsh sigh. He drew himself up higher in his chair, business-like now, more of the old Papa about him. ‘All the same, it was kind of the Professor to retrieve it for us, save our blushes. He’s a good man, after all. A man who still shows some respect.’ He took
a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and laid it over the surface of the painting like a cover on a dead man’s face. ‘Get some sleep now.’
She took that as a dismissal and so she left the room, leaving a small kiss on his forehead. She stayed just outside the door, though, watching him, as though she had become the parent and he the child. For want of spools, she ran through in her head the pictures in her music book: Schubert – or was it Liszt – bleeding onto the piano keys; Beethoven with his ear clamped to the floor. Papa propped the painting up on his easel. He surveyed it as if it was something he himself had just completed. Then, he moved out of view. Craning her neck, she could see that he was on his hands and knees in front of one of the cupboards, a tower of papers on either side of him.
She watched him take out some battered biscuit tins. Then, a clatter of brushes on the desk. Colours in tubes and pots. He rolled the pile of brushes back and forth on his desk with the palm of his hand until he found the one he wanted. Thumbed the bristles then laid the chosen one down in front of him like a dessert spoon. He opened a tube of paint and smeared a little on the back of his hand. Another, then another, until at last he had it as he wanted it.
He poised his brush over the canvas and made a series of vertical lines in the air, flicking the tip back as though trying to remember how it was done. Soon, he was smoothing a layer of red onto the girl’s naked body. He painted out the birthmark first. When Elsa was younger, Mama used to tell her God had marked her out as special. Papa’s brush was more honest. Next her concave chest went, with its small walnut nipples, the thin shoulders and the lower body all disappeared under a layer of red paint. She stayed until it was over and even though he must have known she was watching him, he said nothing. By the time he had finished, a new red dress glowed on the easel.
A Parachute in the Lime Tree Page 6