by Esther Freud
Wolf Belgard found the countryside oppressive, all the space and time that hung so heavily and the landscape empty of the men who worked it. There was no sense in it, but he found the war easier to forget while in Berlin, even with the air-ships floating high above the city and the bands of children with their banners raising private loans to subsidize the war. He wandered round the evening streets. Shops were shutting up and cafes, which had half-heartedly stretched out to catch the sun, were being tucked behind their double folding doors. There was a subdued air of calm and disillusion. A little crowd of women, all in black, stood miserably before a stand where the latest lists of soldiers killed in action had been pasted. There was talk, he knew, of banning the public display of such information, prompted by concern that the conversations resulting from these daily lists of losses, sheet after double sheet of tiny jumping names, led to unpatriotic and defeatist comments.
Wolf stopped and looked about him, trying to re-create the jubilant faces of the crowd who had, on the day that Britain turned on them to declare war, rushed through the streets, hissing and spitting and holding up their fists. He had been swept along himself, rushed about and caught up in the current, and had found himself one of many thousand, bursting with indignation before the closely guarded British embassy.
He had seen a man, professional and well dressed, jump on to the running board of an official car and, leaning past the chauffeur strike the passenger full in the face with his hat. The man, scarlet and trembling with rage, had shouted, still clutching at his eye, that he was not British but American. On hearing this his assailant had apologized, replaced his hat and offered him his card. It was claimed afterwards in the papers that pennies had been tossed from the windows of the British embassy to humiliate the crowd, and in retaliation the people had shattered every pane of glass. But Wolfhad not seen any coins. Stones had certainly been thrown and the splintering and cracking had been accompanied by cheers and shouts, growls and sighs of satisfaction. Wolf had himself felt overwhelmed with the desire to join them. He began to scuffle with his feet, peering for pebbles between the legs of the spectators, and found to his surprise that the square in which they stood was paved with asphalt. ‘Pfui, pfui!’ hissed a thousand contemptuous mouths and, ashamed of it as he was now, he had opened his own mouth and felt the warm snake of solidarity hiss out. ‘Pfui!’ He allowed himself, in a surge of hot blood, to be jostled on to Unter den Linden to stand declaiming outside a hotel known to harbour foreign journalists.
Wolf stopped and looked about him. The streets were virtually deserted, and it made him sweat when he considered with what fickleness he had behaved. It must have been his childish wonder at being in the centre of a crowd that had distracted him from memories of other gatherings, made up as they were of these same people. He had chosen to forget the hostile group who, in the first year of his marriage, had taunted him, hissing and spitting and goading each other on. Marianna, pregnant with their first child, had asked him to escort her on a walk. It was early evening and Wolf had returned from work to find her upset by a lurid article in that day’s paper. It was the story of a five-year-old boy, Emanuel Goldbacher, found with his throat cut on the banks of the river Rhine. The reports suggested it had been a ritualistic murder and, with no evidence against him, a Jewish butcher and his family had been taken from their home and locked up in the local prison. Wolf had folded his wife’s arm in his, and attempted to soothe her with more cheerful conversation as they walked towards the Tiergarten.
It was a favourite pastime to saunter past the house in which they’d met, to look up, smiling, at the windows as if they might just catch the innocent shadows of the people they had been. They had almost reached the gates, absorbed in a teasing game of idiotic name suggestions for the baby, when a fat globule of spit sailed across Wolf’s shoulder and landed on his shoe.
They stopped, still entwined and looked behind them. A crowd had gathered, up to twenty men and women whispering and muttering. A woman pushed her way to the front and, puckering her mouth, prepared to spit again. In an instant Marianna withdrew her arm from his and pulled her coat about her. She advanced upon the woman with such speed and strength of purpose that the other was forced to gulp down her attack and step back onto the ankle of a man, who swore and fell against another woman, who struck him round the head. Marianna opened her mouth wide, exposing the pink and pearly gum above her teeth and laughed at them. The hisses died away, and Wolf, in the fraction of ensuing silence, took his wife’s arm and walked briskly with her through the gates into the park.
‘We shall call our boy Emanuel,’ she said, after half an hour of silence. And although Wolf did not entirely agree with this choice of name for his first son, he looked fondly at his wife and put up no resistance.
Eva knew before she reached the nursery that Omi Lise was dead. It was the silence that wound down to her, and through the open door she could see their nanny lying where they’d left her before breakfast. Her head propped up on pillows, her hair tapering like wax across the sheet.
Eva watched her mother as she leant against the bed. Her eyes were not fixed, as she had expected them to be, on Omi’s setting face but on Bina, who was crouching pale as a statue by the door. Bina’s lips were white and thin, and as Eva tiptoed in her sister shot her an appealing glance. Eva turned away and knelt down by the bed. She blinked and wiped her eyes, and in a horrible transformation she saw Emanuel, his arm bound up, his forehead cold and clammy from his fever.
‘Hadn’t we better get the doctor?’ she had asked.
‘Yes, call the doctor,’ Bina and Martha had agreed.
But Schu-Schu had shaken them off, ordering instead basins of hot water and bowls of disinfectant. She cleaned the wound carefully and dressed it, bound up the poisoned arm with skilful fingers, and mumbled prayers in her own south German drawl. She organized Schwabish songs in rounds and through two days and nights she set up a rota of willing hands to cool Emanuel’s neck and forehead with cold compresses of her own devising.
And then, almost a week early, their mother returned from Rome. ‘Bitten by a dog?’ She reared up on the doorstep and, knocking strings of flowers and iced flannels to the floor, she had fallen on Emanuel. ‘We wanted to look after him ourselves, isn’t that right?’ The governess attempted to explain the absence of the doctor, appealing to the three girls for their support. But Emanuel had saved her by opening his eyes, stretching his healing arm above his head and insisting he was cured.
Eva knelt down and touched the fingers of Omi’s clasped hands. The difference was that Manu had been saved. Omi’s hands were cold and, as she pulled away, she heard Bina shuffle to her feet. ‘We wanted to look after her ourselves, that was all . . .’
‘That was all,’ Martha added, with an echo like a sob, and the four women stood unmoving in the room.
On the first Thursday of September, when Herr Baum came to roll their mother’s hair, Martha and Eva began to search the Berlin apartment.
‘Why in here?’ Martha asked, as they slipped inside and closed the door. ‘There’s not likely to be any trace of Schu in here.’
Eva looked over at the large, leather-topped desk and wondered how it was possible for Emanuel to disappear so completely. ‘You’d think he’d be allowed to send one letter out,’ she said, ‘wherever he is.’ And she sat down on the high-backed chair and, picking up his pen, dipped it in the jar of ink. The ink had thinned and hardened with disuse and she had to pierce a thick film with the nib to reach it. Then she set the soft side of the pen against the blotting paper and let it crease a dark dent into the weave.
‘Why don’t we just stay here until Bina gets back from the hospital?’ And Martha stretched out on Emanuel’s bed, lying back against a bank of pillows. ‘After all, we’re not likely to find anything.’
‘Yes,’ Eva agreed, ‘you’re right.’ But, despite herself, she began, one by one, to pull open the deep drawers of her brother’s desk. There was nothing much in them. Notes from st
udies he had made and the dissected bones of poems pulled apart and examined line by line. There were no hidden envelopes, no scrawled addresses, and as she pulled it, each drawer opened smoothly in her hand.
Martha rolled half-heartedly off the bed to peer beneath it. ‘Why would Mama even think of hiding anything in here?’ Having reassured herself of this, she settled down in comfort, folded her arms and stared stubbornly at the ceiling.
Eva found a small iron key in one of the inbuilt compartments of the desk. She tried it in the lock of each drawer and found that it turned with a smooth, identical click. How unlike Emanuel not to have a secret, and she frowned in disappointment as she thought of her own elaborate hoard of treasure suspended safely in mid-air. She let her fingers run in and out of the tiny range of boxes, all dusted and clear with polish, pulling out small objects as she came upon them. A penknife, a faded pebble, and in one, a heavy red and yellow rose picked while still in bud. Eva held the rosebud in her hands, staring into the oval mouth of leaves, and thought of the thin petals she had sent to him in letters, glued so delicately to the borders of each page. Would he be wearing them sewn into his clothes, laced against the Siberian winds with ink and faded flowers? She shook her head and replaced the rose.
Martha had drifted off into a fitful sleep, her feet twitching back and forth to the rhythm of a waltz. ‘One two three,’ her mouth moved sleepily.
Eva shook her shoulder. ‘Come on, we must look in one more room before Baum drinks his schnapps and Bina arrives home.’ Martha sat up, and wiped a tiny trickle of saliva from her cheek.
They closed the door with careful fingers and tiptoed off along the corridor. ‘Ssh,’ they hissed, stepping lightly over carpets, ‘ssh.’
Then Eva stopped and, with an amused smile, took her sister’s arm. ‘Why are we whispering?’ she whispered. And they both began to laugh.
‘Stop acting so suspiciously,’ Martha scolded her in turn, and they were about to go more noisily on their way when they heard the twittering voice of old Herr Baum call out from behind the drapes.
‘Can it be the charming Fräuleins Belgard?’ He swung open the door, a brush in his hand and a cluster of pins rustling in the pocket of his apron.
‘Come in for a moment,’ Marianna called, ‘and say good afternoon to our dear friend.’ Seeing no way to avoid it, the two girls stepped inside where they resigned themselves to lingering for another hour while their mother’s hairdresser regaled them with local news and gossip, all sweetly and discreetly wrapped, interspersed only with a regular shower of compliments thrown over their two heads.
It was after six when the apartment door banged shut and they heard Bina’s footsteps in the hall. Herr Baum peeled the cloth from Marianna’s shoulders and folded it carefully before placing it in his bag. ‘How fortunate. I shall have the opportunity to greet yet another of my favourite ladies.’ He gave the gleaming head of his most regular customer one last, loving glance.
Marianna escorted Herr Baum to the door and Eva and Martha trailed along behind. ‘Good evening.’ Bina came politely forward, flashing searching looks over his shoulder. Eva and Martha dropped their gaze. ‘Well, most likely we will see you again next week.’ She turned away from him in an attempt to catch her sisters as they backed hastily along the corridor.
‘Next week, then.’ Marianna rested her hand on the latch of the door, and as Eva hurried away she heard Herr Baum shuffle his feet and mumble something uneasy and apologetic about a small matter of outstanding credit.
‘So?’ Bina caught them in the drawing room, lounging on the sofa. Eva held a cushion against her for protection. ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ‘We’ve made a thorough inspection of the whole apartment, and there was nothing there.’
Martha glanced from her to Bina, and decided to avoid a fight. ‘Mama isn’t hiding anything,’ she agreed, and Bina, furious, sank down beside them.
At first Bina insisted on reading Schu’s last words aloud at intervals throughout each week. She kept her sisters cold and shivering at the far end of her bed, hoping to intensify the letter’s contents, and to cancel out the presence of their mother, who still came in to wish them all goodnight. But it was not long before Eva led Martha in a small revolt, in which they lay like hedgehogs under down and pretended to be asleep when Bina called to them.
‘Of course we won’t forget her.’ They sighed, huffing and struggling into their mother’s choice of clothes, and they glared at Bina behind her back for holding out so little faith in them.
‘It is very modern not to have a governess,’ the other girls at school insisted. ‘We’re doing everything we can to rid ourselves of ours.’ But the Samson sisters wrote that they were quite shaken by news of Fräulein Schulze’s sudden dismissal, especially in such uncertain times, and that they couldn’t imagine what Frau Belgard could be thinking of.
Marianna watched her husband, nodding and frowning over his newspaper, and had to stop herself from wondering who he was. ‘Do something, why can’t you?’ she muttered, through clenched teeth, her head trembling with the effort not to shout, and although at times she caught the unfairness of her thoughts, she couldn’t find it in her to forgive him.
‘I think, if you don’t mind,’ he mumbled, ‘I won’t be home for lunch today.’
Marianna caught her cold eyes in the mirror, waiting for a further explanation. ‘If that suits you, of course,’ she agreed, when nothing more was said, and she freed a coil of dark brown hair, letting it spring out of its comb.
She turned to him. She held out her hands, palms upwards, and opened her eyes wide. ‘Soon there won’t be any lunch to come home to. Have you any idea what it costs to find enough food to feed this family? I can’t survive indefinitely with so little money. I don’t see what you expect me to do.’
Wolf looked at her without an answer. He was quite convinced she knew that small amounts of gold had been removed by him each month from the safe behind the airing cupboard. Four squat boxes, one for each of their children, which had been growing in the dark, birthday by birthday, relative by relative, over the years.
Marianna sighed, and Wolf felt tempted to dig into his pocket for the key. He could skim it at her across the carpet and let her remove the next few coins herself. ‘I will do what I can,’ he said, and he reached over for the corner of her dressing gown, rubbing his finger down frayed satin and twisting it round his finger like a ring.
The Samson sisters arrived one afternoon to ask after Emanuel. Bina was on duty at the hospital and Martha had gone with the maid to queue for butter. Eva brought the girls into the drawing room where she’d been laying out new plans for her and Emanuel’s dream home. She’d laid foundations for the ground floor and was working on the bedrooms. She’d split the attic into two and given them a bedroom each with no room for any guests. People may visit, they’d both decided, but only for an afternoon.
Angelika and Julika sat opposite while Eva shuffled her papers out of sight. ‘There is still no news,’ she told them quickly, hoping to get the subject over with. And the two girls smiled and nodded, while, Eva felt sure, suppressing some new, exciting news about themselves. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She ran silently through stories, old or overheard, that might pass as her own to entertain them, and then just as she was sure they were about to burst and tell her everything, she heard her mother step into the hall.
‘How are you?’ They both rose in one sympathetic gesture, and Marianna set down a jug of bitter-smelling coffee. She poured it out with an apology, and as they sipped, another silence grew.
‘Mama.’ Eva turned towards her in a flash of inspiration. ‘Mama, could you tell us about your gambling days?’
Marianna blushed. The gambling story was a favourite of Wolf’s and until now she’d never been called upon to tell it. ‘It was so long ago, you can’t be interested?’ But both Samson girls set down their cups expectantly folding their hands as they prepared to listen.
‘Well, it was when
my mother was still alive,’ Marianna told them, ‘and let me say, it was only one gambling day. At Monte Carlo.’ She settled into her seat. ‘I was eighteen when I set off on my honeymoon and at every hotel on our route there was a letter waiting from my mother who was most concerned about me. She even wrote to one hotel to request that the room be heated to fourteen degrees for our arrival as she did not want her only daughter, or her new son-in-law, to catch a chill. But for all her forethought we were still shown into an icy room – which I noticed had the number fourteen marked clearly on the door.’ The sisters laughed, their eyes floating into the future.
‘When we arrived at Monte Carlo there was an extremely frantic letter full of descriptions of men whose lives had been ruined by gambling at the casinos. She had read these reports in the paper. One man, apparently, had lost his entire fortune and was found hanging below a bridge, while another became so embroiled in debt that he never dared return home and was thought by his family to be wandering like a tramp through Switzerland. “Please, my dear Marianna, I beg you, use your influence to keep Wolfgang away from the casinos.”
‘I showed this letter to my new husband. “Read it very carefully,” I urged him. “It does seem worrying.” But Wolf laughed and said he’d already made plans for us both to go that night to the most famous casino in the town. “It’s all right,” he reassured me. “Everything of value is locked in the hotel safe and the money I’ll bring with me, I shall be quite prepared to lose.” He told me to put away my mother’s letter and to get ready for that night.
‘By the time we arrived at the casino I was very excited and longing to see inside. “Do you have a passport with you?” the manager asked, having taken a note of our names and address. No, we didn’t have passports. “Do you have any proof of your identity?” Wolf searched through the pockets of his jacket. No. We had nothing to prove who we were. “Well, I’m afraid,” the manager informed us, “we will not be able to allow you to come in.”