by Esther Freud
A few years later, without our having met again, my grandmother died quietly in her sleep. I asked if I could have a photo.
‘Of course.’ My father chose the picture I’d admired of the three girls dressed in summer white, smiling and lounging on the porch. He also gave me a photograph of Eva by herself. She stood in profile, her shoulders back, her eyelids lowered and her almost perfect nose sloping straight down towards her chin.
‘You look so like her!’ My sisters stared hard at the portrait, tracing the bobble of the chin. ‘It’s amazing.’
I flushed and bit my lip, wondering why it made me feel so ridiculously glad. ‘I’ll order you both a print,’ I offered, but Natasha said she’d prefer a copy of the sisters, Eva, Martha and Bina, lounging on cane chairs, and Kate agreed that she’d like one as well.
The photograph was still in its frame, the polish of the wood worn out at the corners, and it was tricky to remove the back. One clip snapped off in my hand and then the back came away. The smell of dust and old sweet powder made me sneeze. At first I thought the photograph was unusually thick, printed on to cardboard, but as I held it up I realized there was a second, smaller picture welded to its back. I peeled it carefully away and found the close-up picture of a man. He was dressed in uniform, the high-collared uniform of the First World War, and he looked confident and hopeful, staring straight into the lens. His hair was brushed back from his face, and his chin rested on one hand, a hand so fine and smooth I guessed the portrait must have been made before he ever went to war. ‘Emanuel Belgard’ was written on the back.
I showed it to my father. ‘Who is this, do you know?’ He turned the photo over in his hands, marvelling at the different shades of grey. ‘How extraordinary.’ He traced the fine inked letters of the name. ‘My uncle Emanuel. My mother’s elder brother.’
‘An uncle, but I thought it was just three girls, your mother and two sisters?’
‘No.’ My father was impatient suddenly to begin work and he fixed the canvas with such a sharp look of concentration that I had to save my questions for another time.
I left the picture of Emanuel Belgard lying out, intending to find out more about him, but eventually, assuming he must have been killed during that war like so many other millions, I put him for safekeeping back behind his sisters, clipping them all shut together in their frame.
Chapter 7
‘It’s the war, it’s the war,’ Bina sang, when a letter arrived for Emanuel with a date and a time for him to report to his superior officer. She ran to the cupboard where his National Service uniform hung and struggled to pull it down. Emanuel took it from her and held it up against himself. The oval of his face seemed to shrink and pale above it.
‘When you’re home again,’ Bina began, but her mother reached for the uniform and, handing it to Dolfi, ordered that it should be pressed and aired and kept out of sight until the moment it was needed.
‘But when you do come home on leave,’ Bina continued, ‘will you bring –’ But she was cut off by Fräulein Schulze who arrived in high colour to hear the news and knocked a china ornament to the floor where it cracked into three jagged pieces.
Emanuel left the room. ‘Go after him, Eva,’ Marianna urged, and Eva ran and caught hold of his hand, while Martha and Bina, Omi Lise and his mother all stood in the doorway and called for him to come back and join them for late breakfast.
Wolf Belgard was in Berlin, inspecting a new warehouse. Marianna sent frantic messages for him to return to Gaglow, but Emanuel followed these with messages of his own, insisting that he should not interrupt unfinished business, and that in his opinion the mobilization of men was nothing but a show of strength. The war, if there was one, would be over within a month.
Gruber dressed in his finest livery to drive the short distance to the train. He stood sweltering in gold and blue, flicking the reins with proud, tightly cuffed wrists. Marianna had a hat with flowers in its brim and she sat beside Emanuel longing to clasp his fingers in her hand. Bina, Martha and Eva sat across from her, their backs to the horses.
‘Will you be fighting alongside Josef Friedlander?’ Bina asked, blushing darkly.
Martha nudged her. ‘Was he the one at the party with the curled moustache?’
‘With the drooping ears, you mean,’ Eva added.
Marianna frowned at them, and made a mental note to look up the Friedlander mother and see what kind of woman she was.
There were men at the station still in civilian clothes. They jostled and waved and shouted to each other as the train pulled in. It burst with startled faces, full of bravado, straining out at every window, and hundreds of men, sitting in the glaring light, bareheaded in the open trucks that had been attached to the back carriage.
Messages had been scrawled in great exclaiming letters across the doors, ‘To Paris’ and ‘To Victory’. Wives and sisters had added hearts and their own private messages of hope. Emanuel recognized many of the faces fighting for space. There was the son of the blacksmith, and the boys who worked as gardeners on the estate. He smiled at them and they grinned in his direction, clearing a small space around him as he stood stiffly in his heavy jacket, the buttons buffed, and his trousers tucked neatly at the knee into shin-tight leather boots.
Marianna stood close beside him and the scent of flowers from her hat filled his nose and mouth. ‘Will you write?’ she asked, putting her hand on his arm. Emanuel began to move towards the train.
‘Manu, Manu,’ his sisters called after him. Feeling himself about to sneeze he jumped aboard and Gruber followed with his bags.
As the train pulled away he saw his mother and three sisters standing with the throng of other women, all in white ruffled high-necked shirts, and hats and scarves against the sun. Their arms waved in a fluttering sea of gloves and fingers and he had to keep his eyes fixed on the blue ribbon in Eva’s hair so as not to lose sight of his own reeling family.
Marianna was silent as the carriage drove them home. From under the brim of her hat she let her gaze pass over the faces of her daughters. Today it made her smile to think how many hours of her life she’d given to worrying that Emanuel would be her only child. He had been born within a year of her marriage, and it still stung her eyes to think how delighted she had been with him. How she had dressed him and washed him and insisted that the nurse wake her if he cried during the night. ‘It’s all very well,’ Wolf teased, ‘but how will you manage when you have six sons all howling after you?’ and he had placed an expectant hand on the flat of her stomach. But the years passed and with each month the familiar dragging ache in her knees signalled, yet again, that she had failed to catch the beginning of a life.
‘You will have to be an only child like me,’ she crooned over her son, and she thought of what her father called ‘the holy trinity’ of her own small family. And then, one after another, her daughters had been born.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Martha asked, and Marianna wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.
She considered telling them something about the life of an only child, its loneliness and quiet, but found herself remembering her friend the curtain mender who came regularly to help her mother. ‘I was thinking,’ she told Martha, ‘about a very old woman and how whenever she reached the most exciting moment of a story, she began to stutter.’
‘How very tiresome.’ Bina raised her eyes.
‘Not at all. She used to let me cut out flowers to pin onto the cloth . . .’ But Martha was whispering some secret into Eva’s ear, and Bina, rather than listen to her mother, was trying to overhear what they were saying.
Marianna sent off to her aunt Cornelia for the recipe of Tree Cake. Tree Cake had been her own favourite childhood treat. It was an exotic cake, layered in rings around a hollow trunk, with flakes of chocolate to look like bark, and to prise the recipe from her aunt was the hardest task she could set herself on Emanuel’s behalf. Another aunt had been obsessed with cleanliness, wiping the handles of doors her guests had
passed through, and dusting off the seats of their chairs, but Aunt Cornelia had kept the recipe for Tree Cake all to herself and moulded an identity around the mystique of its ingredients.
Dear, dear Manu,
Eva wrote before he’d hardly had a chance to get away.
I’ve been going over our plans for the future, and do you think, when the time comes to build our house we could make sure it’s near a forest? Maybe by now you’ve even seen the perfect place. I suppose the one good thing about you going off again so soon is that the more you travel the more opportunity you’ll have for finding the perfect spot.
Eva curved her elbow round the page to hide the letter from her sisters.
Please don’t forget I want a garden with a wooden fence around it and a broad summer tree with a fork in it for a hammock. I know you plan to have two good horses, one especially for Sunday and another with a mild temperament to ride around on during the week, but recently I’ve been wondering how I will get about. I’d have my bicycle, of course, but maybe we should consider a motorcar. We could keep it in a special wooden house and only ever use it when we visit the rest of the family, which I imagine, occasionally, we’ll have to do.
Eva looked round at the bent heads of her sisters. Sometimes the temptation to boast about her and Manu’s secret plans was more than she could bear.
‘What are you boring our poor brother with?’ Bina asked, leaning across to seize her page, and Eva, holding on to their promise, slipped the letter out of reach and sealed it in an envelope.
Bina wrote short notes to Emanuel describing the health and escapades of the various dogs and, sealed in its own envelope, she repeated the exact same news, with a doubling of passion, to be forwarded on to Josef Friedlander, who was serving in the same regiment.
Martha, who had fallen in love vicariously with Josef alongside Bina, added poems in French and then, unsure whether she was now writing in an enemy language, translated them painstakingly into German.
‘And what about Paris? For all the honeymoon couples?’ Martha asked one night, as her neck was being washed, and Schu-Schu promised that the war would never come between a girl and her wedding plans. She continued to insist upon this, even after the line was formed right across France to the sea, with the collected enemy lined up in trenches on the other side. She promised that a special path could be cleared across no man’s land to let the newly-weds through to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower.
Wolf returned to Gaglow for the first week of August, and as soon as he arrived the world declared war against each other like firecrackers catching. Russia, France and then Great Britain. They received a letter from Emanuel. He had been assigned to a cavalry regiment and was in daily training at a camp in Schleswig. ‘It seems,’ he wrote, ‘that it is the small things in this war that are going to prove most difficult, and the fact that we are burning to put our lives at risk will not be of much consequence.’ He went on to explain that, after a week strapped to the back of a horse, the lower half of his body was in such agony that he was virtually unable to sit down, stand up, or walk more than a few steps.
Marianna read the letter aloud, making her daughters blush and giggle. ‘“But, of course, our greatest problem is coming up with a plan to wean the horses off their favourite foods. They refuse everything except the choicest bread and pears, even though I tell them when they grumble that they must make sacrifices like everyone else, but I’m afraid they only snort with disapproval, turning up their noses – sorry, Papa – at the finest oats and barley.”’ Marianna smiled at her husband. It made her proud to think that grain passing almost through his hands was helping to support the German army.
‘My dear family,’ Emanuel wrote again from Schleswig, ‘It’s still uncertain when we set off. It is possible that we might not be fighting against the French and British, but against Indians and Japanese! How strange this will be, but I hasten to add it should not prevent us from winning.’
And when, in October, his regiment began to move into France, he wrote in a burst of enthusiasm: ‘Last night we slept out in the fields wrapped in our coats against the rain, and the morale of the men could not have been higher. There are forty-eight cavalry regiments lying here next to one another in an endless line of trenches. Lions, hussars, dragoons, cuirassiers. I have an overwhelming feeling that things will turn out for the best, even though the air is thick with cannonfire. It will be hard for you to imagine but no one takes much notice, and the only real complaints are about the food. Last night the bread was so thick and full of dough we all preferred to fast.’ Marianna broke off and looked towards her husband.
‘The Belgians,’ Wolf said, ‘disrupting rail links.’ He buried his head in his newspaper and refused to comment further.
‘Is there really nothing you can do?’ Marianna tried again.
Wolf closed his eyes and laid his hand over hers. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe,’ and the two deep lines above his nose merged together, shooting upwards in a thick furrow as he frowned.
Wolf Belgard was one of very few who was not behind the war. It is a blunder on a massive scale, he thought privately, and as he read his daily paper he shook his head to think that not one of these thousands of men, foot soldiers, officers or generals, had ever fired a single war-time shot.
Bina reached for Manu’s latest letter. She sped through the closely written words, unable to believe that once again her brother had failed to include any messages of hope for her from Josef Friedlander. ‘What can he be thinking of?’ She flung it away, and all at the long table turned to glare at her with a hard range of disapproving looks.
Martha took the letter. She touched the pages with her fingertips and began to cry quietly on to the paper. ‘Please just win,’ she whispered, and Eva, unable to sit by and see the precious words smudge and dissolve, eased it from her.
Eva read the letter through from beginning to end and still found little to satisfy her curiosity. Emanuel never mentioned the future or his plans for after the war. He only mentioned that he was being sent on somewhere else. By the time Eva had read the letter several times, searching for anything that might be construed as code, the breakfast dishes had been cleared and everyone else had left the table.
Fräulein Schulze put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Your sisters are waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Have you forgotten? There’s a trip planned to the forest.’ Eva, immediately distracted, jumped up and ran to find her hat. Gabrielle Schulze, left alone, slipped the letter back into its envelope and folded it away into the pocket of her dress.
Bina, Martha and Eva settled into the carriage with their mother and sat back while Gruber set the horses at a steady pace. They were going to a beauty spot where they planned to meet Frau Samson and her daughters. They had not seen Angelika or Julika since their visit to the Castle, but their names came up regularly in conversation, and Bina had begun a correspondence.
‘Do you know,’ Bina said now, her round face creasing up with envy, ‘that between them they’ve had seven proposals of marriage?’
‘I wonder who they’re saving themselves for.’ Martha smiled.
Bina snapped, ‘Well, they can’t both marry the same man.’
‘No, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting to,’ Martha added, and she grinned at her own cleverness in answering Bina back.
Eva, who sat opposite with her mother, turned away. I’d rather talk about the war than listen to any more of their nonsense. She tapped Gruber on the shoulder and asked after his nephew who was dug into a trench in France.
‘We’ve had no news of him for over two weeks,’ he answered.
‘Oh, we had a letter from Manu only today,’ Eva boasted, and sensing her mistake she lapsed into silence.
To pass the time Marianna offered to tell them about her own mother’s engagement. Bina screwed up her eyes in contemplation but Martha was unable to resist. ‘Please do, do tell us,’ she said. And Eva turned one ear towards her.
‘My mother,’ Marianna began, ‘
a girl of seventeen, was sitting at the table with an enormous pile of socks and stockings.’ ‘How romantic.’ Bina sniggered, but Marianna continued, ‘She had only just begun to darn when there was a knock at the door. It was a cousin with her new husband. They had a carriage waiting and they planned to drive out to Französisch Buchholz. Mama was delighted, but her mother said that unfortunately she would not be able to go. She needed the stockings urgently, and there was no one who could darn stockings quite like her. So, Mama, usually very mild, insisted she should be allowed to go. She begged her mother, beseeched her, until finally, after nearly half an hour, she had no choice but to relent. The stockings were packed away and, having changed into her best dress, she stepped into the carriage. It was a beautiful summer’s day. The trees swayed in the breeze and the sky was blue without a single cloud.’ Marianna stopped for a moment to take in the faces of her daughters, captured for once in the full flow of her own interest.
‘Go on.’ Bina frowned.
‘Well, almost as soon as the party arrived they met up with some acquaintances, a couple who had also asked a friend to accompany them, and this friend turned out to be no one other . . .’ Marianna was triumphant ‘. . . no one other than my papa!’ It was as if she had somehow arranged the whole event herself.