‘Then why can’t I have a letter from her?’
He threw himself into his desk chair with a moan of impatience. I was pushing him close to the line and my fear was always that Alicja would be the one made to pay if I did. He sighed heavily and lit one of his small black cigars that smelt as evil as his soul.
‘I will spell it out one more time, Klara, and after that I don’t want to hear anything about it again. You understand?’
I understood.
He rapped his knuckles on his desk. I think he wanted to rap them on my head. ‘I have placed you in this crucial position in Oberführer Fleischer’s life so that you can feed me information on everything he does outside his office. Who he sees, who he talks to on the telephone, where he goes, what letters he receives, who comes to the apartment. What he thinks and what he hates. What he dreams about at night. I want you inside his head and reporting everything – I mean everything – to me.’
‘Why?’
A frown crowded his face but he made a visible effort to push it away. ‘Because I don’t trust him. Though he is my senior officer, I and certain of my fellow officers have reason to believe he is not loyal to the Führer.’
‘But a letter from Alicja? What harm in that?’
‘ Dummkopf!’
I looked down at my feet to hide my eyes from him.
‘Oberführer Fleischer wants you to himself, Klara, don’t you understand that? Cut free from all your ties to the past. So no, he will not tolerate any reminder that you once belonged to another man in marriage and produced a Polish child.’
‘I have never belonged to any man, Oskar. The Oberführer is not stupid. Look at me. I’m thirty-four. He knows I have a history.’
‘You are right that he is not stupid. He is a respected German officer. But all men are stupid when it comes to women. I told you before, he will be having you watched, every move you make. If you make contact with any of your treacherous comrades in the Polish Resistance here in Warsaw—’ he paused and stubbed out his cigar. As if he were stubbing it out in someone’s eye. ‘You will be signing their death warrant.’
‘I am no fool, Oskar. I know too well what happens in a Nazi-occupied country. But why should I believe you that he is having me watched.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Klara! He may be besotted by you and bring you flowers, take you dancing and fuck the hell out of you. But he does not trust you.’
‘Any more than he trusts you.’
It was like a slap. He rose swiftly to his feet. Tall and commanding, arrogance etched into every bone in his body. He walked over to me and fixed his steel-grey eyes on mine. I did not look down at my feet to hide my rage. Not this time.
‘Klara, think!’ His voice was low and without threat. As if we were disagreeing about a book we’d read. It made his words more dangerous. ‘Don’t for one minute think you can run to him and tell him I have forced you to be his lover to spy on him. Yes, of course he would have me shot.’ He used his hand to imitate a gun to his head. ‘But he would have you shot at the same time.’
He smiled. As though he were being kind. Warning me.
‘And after our corpses are tipped into the cold earth,’ he said leaning close, ‘who would look after Alicja? Answer me that, Klara.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ALICJA
‘Wake up, Mama. Wake up!’
Alicja shook her mother. Instantly she regretted it. It made her mother sit bolt upright in bed, her eyes huge with alarm and her hands groping for something inside her pillowcase. Alicja wrapped an arm around her lean shoulders to hold her still.
‘It’s all right, Mama. You’re safe.’
Her mother’s eyes came back from somewhere dark and far away and focused on her daughter with relief. ‘Alicja,’ she said softly.
The sunken hollows of her cheeks were grey and bruised-looking, but at the sight of Alicja the tiny muscles under her skin let go. She smiled reassuringly. ‘I’m back.’
‘Look!’ Alicja grinned. ‘You did it.’
In each hand Alicja held up a passport. The curtain around their bunk beds was drawn closed, so she lifted the small blue documents to her lips and kissed them.
‘You did it, Mama,’ she said again, her breath coming with great whoops of excitement. ‘You are so—’
Her mother’s lips touched her cheek, silencing her, and she swung her bare feet to the floor. They sat side by side on the edge of the thin mattress, her mother still in her crumpled dress and with a scarf tied around her neck. Alicja again wrapped her arm around her, pulling her close.
‘Was it hard, Mama? Did you have much trouble in Hanover?’
‘No, my sweetheart, no trouble. It was simple. I went to the bar that Hanna told me about where a man gave me the address of a woman who . . .’ her voice fell to almost nothing, ‘did the work for me, and that was it. The hardest part was the twenty kilometre trudge back to camp in the dark.’
Mama laughed. The way she laughed that time she was almost run down by a Krupp searchlight truck driven by a German soldier in Warsaw. Alicja leaned her weight against her mother’s arm to tether them together.
‘How much did they cost, Mama?’
‘Everything.’
‘No money left for—?’
‘No. It’s all gone.’
‘We’ll get more.’
Her mother’s hand encircled Alicja’s. ‘How?’
‘I will go out again through the drain tonight.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll be careful, I promise.’
‘No, Alicja. No.’
Her mother’s hand gripped hard and didn’t let go.
‘I thought you were dead, Klara.’
The words came from Mama’s friend Davide, the Frenchman who worked in Administration. He was the one who’d kept Alicja out of hospital, so she gave him a smile. He was leaning against the outside of their hut with the kind of bonelessness that meant he’d been there a long time.
‘I thought you were dead, Klara,’ he said again as they emerged from the hut to head over to the Washroom block.
Something in his voice sounded like pain and his face could not summon up his usual easy smile. He was a good-looking man, even Alicja could see that, with lovely dense wavy hair that moved as much as his hands when he talked. But if he’d thought her mother was dead, he didn’t know her mother.
‘Klara,’ he said as he approached, ‘don’t do that to me again.’
But instead of laughing at him the way Alicja expected her mother to do, her mother stood very still and her eyes glistened with sudden unshed tears.
No. No. Her mother never cried.
No, Mama. Please.
She watched, dumbstruck, as Davide reached out and pulled her mother into his arms. He held her firmly, her forehead slumped on his shoulder. Alicja stared. Frightened her mother would never lift it up. But then he stepped back and gently unwound the scarf from her neck, revealing a blood-stained bandage underneath. Only then did Alicja see the dark telltale marks on the front of her clothes.
How had she not seen them before?
How could she be so blind?
It was the passports with their gold emblem on the front. They had dazzled her.
‘Alicja,’ Davide said quietly, ‘take your mother to the washroom, bathe her wound and bring her to me. That’s a nasty gash. I have a first-aid kit with bandages in my office. Alicja! Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes.’
She took her mother’s hand.
‘It’s nothing,’ Mama insisted.
Alicja didn’t know which one to believe.
Alicja stood just inside the doorway of the Administration office, shifting from foot to foot. She was uneasy. Confined in this all-male world of uniforms and hair oil, of boot polish and metal cabinets. It smelled of order and discipline.
Her mother was seated on a chair in front of one of the two desks while Davide Bouvier tended her. On the corner of the other desk a British soldier had pe
rched himself, smoking and making sympathetic noises. Alicja watched Davide closely. She didn’t trust anyone. She wanted to elbow him away and take his place.
But he handled her mother as delicately as if she were a newborn kitten. At the convent one winter a stray cat had crept into one of the dormitories and produced a litter of five kittens under one of the beds. Alicja was given the task of transferring the tiny bundles of black fur to the gardener’s shed and she had carried each fragile little kitten in the palm of her hand, protecting it from the rain, as though it were made of dandelion fluff. That’s how Davide handled her mother’s throat.
He gently dabbed ointment on the nasty gash and covered it with a rectangle of lint, his fingers barely touching the skin of her long pale throat. He murmured softly, words Alicja didn’t catch, and bandaged her neck with concentrated care.
All the time, her mother sat in silence. Her gaze was fixed on his face. Her blue eyes half-closed. Alicja felt her own throat grow tight. When Davide had finished and stood back to admire his handiwork, her mother had smiled warmly.
‘Thank you, Dr Bouvier.’
But he wasn’t a doctor. He was a Frenchman.
‘Can you walk?’
‘Of course I can walk,’ Alicja said loftily.
But Rafal was right to be concerned. Her back still felt as if a swarm of bees had burrowed just under her skin.
‘What did Jan Blach say when you gave him my note?’ she asked.
‘He said to tell you yes.’
‘Did he look annoyed? Or pleased?’
‘Pleased. Definitely pleased. He smiled to himself.’
‘That’s good.’ She nudged an elbow into her friend’s arm. ‘Dziękuję, Rafal. Thank you.’
They were heading over to the sports field. That was a rather glorified name for it. It was no more than a scrubby patch of land used for any kind of sporting activity, with goalposts at each end made from scrounged timber and cargo netting. It was right at the back of the camp and exerted a pull on young boys who should be in lessons and men more than ready to kick the hell out of a ball. Empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littered its edge.
‘I’ll stay,’ Rafal offered. ‘Nearby.’ He patted his pocket. ‘With my slingshot.’
For six paces Alicja said nothing. ‘All right,’ she muttered awkwardly. And because she couldn’t find the right words to say thank you, she slid her hand in his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ALICJA
It was Oskar Scholz’s tallness that made Alicja uneasy. Sitting down, it would not have mattered. His long legs would have been tucked away. But here in the open, striding around the perimeter of the sports field, she was forced to tip her head back to look up at him. She could see the blond fur inside his nostrils. The scar under his chin. The way his Adam’s apple moved like an animal trapped under his skin. He was already waiting there on the side of the pitch, hands in his pockets, when she arrived. The sky loomed in a brilliant blue arc above him and it seemed to her that if he reached up he could touch it.
‘Hello, I’m Alicja.’
She held out her hand to show she intended no harm – that’s what a handshake was for, wasn’t it? – and he shook it firmly and politely. He gave her a warm smile. She was used to that. People took one look at her face and always smiled at her.
‘It’s because you look like a golden angel,’ her mother would laugh.
But it struck Alicja as a good thing that when they gazed into her wide blue eyes they couldn’t see right the way through to what was going on inside her head. It taught her not to trust people’s faces.
‘Good morning, Alicja. This is an unexpected pleasure.’
‘I wanted to speak to you.’
‘That’s good. Because I would like to speak to you too.’
‘It’s important.’
He inclined his head down towards her, the sunlight catching the broken lens of his spectacles. ‘Does your mother know we are speaking?’
The conversation ended. Right there.
All Alicja’s words seemed to freeze in her head. Other sounds usurped their place. Shouts from the group of men kicking a football on the pitch; the noise of a home-made drum being beaten nearby; the rusty caw of a crow circling on ragged wings overhead. They all felt more real than the blurred ideas in her mind that had brought her here in the first place.
‘No, my mother doesn’t know.’
‘I thought not.’ He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. ‘Unless she sent you here.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘I believe you, Alicja.’
Again the conversation stumbled to a halt. This was far harder than she had imagined. Her eyes suddenly sought Rafal and found him on the opposite side of the pitch among a group of boys cheering on the striker who was racing for goal. Rafal’s gaze was on her, not on the ball.
‘Come, Alicja, let’s walk.’
Walk? Walk where?
Scholz set off with an easy stride in a circuit of the football pitch and she had to hurry to keep up.
‘Sometimes,’ he said pleasantly, ‘it is easier to talk when you’re walking alongside someone, don’t you find?’
‘No.’
He smiled. ‘Your mother mentioned you were sick. Are you better now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Excellent. What was the problem?’
‘Herr Scholz, I—’
‘Call me Herr Blach.’
She heard a slight roughness in his voice that time. Like sandpaper on her skin.
‘Herr Blach, I didn’t come here to talk about me.’
He stopped walking abruptly. ‘So why did you come here, Alicja?’
‘To talk about Mama.’
They walked for several minutes in silence with the breeze in their face, bringing the odours of freshly cut timber from the construction of a new hut and of cabbage soup from the kitchens. Alicja didn’t care what kind of soup was churned out each day, as long as it was hot and in her stomach.
Scholz had slowed his pace to make it easier for her. They both ignored the men chasing up the pitch, but halfway around the circuit they passed behind the group of scruffy boys spectating and she saw Rafal turn his head to inspect her companion. He gave no sign of acknowledgement to her, for which she was grateful, but he patted the pocket of his trousers where his slingshot lay.
Scholz did something Alicja had not expected. He rested a hand on her shoulder as they walked. She didn’t know why. Nor what it meant. But a great ache of longing opened up inside her. Papa used to do that, rest the palm of his hand on her shoulder, her head, her back, so that they were joined together. One person. It was five years since the German Messerschmidt shot him out of the sky and she grieved that she could recall so little about him now, even his laughing face fading from her grasp. But that, she did remember. The feel of his strong hand on her shoulder. Bound together, bone to bone.
‘Tell me, Alicja, what it is you want to know about your mother?’
Now. Spit out the words.
‘I want to know what happened to Mama in Warsaw. When I was in the convent.’
‘What makes you think anything happened?’
‘I know my mother.’
‘Of course.’ His voice was oddly gentle.
‘When she took me away from the convent three years later, she was . . . different.’
‘Different in what way?’
She closed her lips tight. She had said enough. She felt his eyes on her as she walked but she wouldn’t look at him.
‘We were friends in Warsaw, your mother and I.’
‘Liar!’ The word slid out before she could stop it. ‘She hates you.’
His hand grew heavier on her shoulder. ‘Maybe now. But not then.’
‘You are German. You were her enemy.’
‘That’s true. But friendships can cross barriers, Alicja. Don’t judge me through the wrong end of a telescope. It distorts reality.’
Alicja blinked and stared down at her
torn canvas shoes as they scuffed over the scrubby grass. What did he mean?
His hand abandoned her shoulder. She felt the loss of it but gave no sign.
‘I’ll tell you, Alicja, short and simple. I placed your mother in a job as Polish translator to a senior SS officer in Warsaw. They started an affair. She lived with him for the three years you were in the convent.’
‘Liar, liar liar! Mama would never have abandoned me for a German.’ Alicja spat not once, but twice in the dirt. ‘She loved Papa.’
‘He was dead.’
‘But I was alive. I was still in Warsaw.’
Alicja’s voice had risen. Snatched by the wind. A sickness seemed to sweep up from her stomach and lodge in her throat.
‘You ask her. Whether she took an SS officer for a lover.’
Alicja clamped her teeth on her tongue to prevent any more words escaping. The more she said, the worse it got. She turned her face away.
‘Very well, Alicja. Let us put this conversation behind us. It never took place. I am Jan Blach. Oskar Scholz does not exist. I can see you are upset, but you are a sensible girl. Forget the past. Go forward into the future. Tell your Mama to do the same.’
Alicja tried to nod but nothing was working right. She dragged air into her lungs by the scruff and made herself ask the question, ‘Is that why Mama is afraid of you? Because you might tell Colonel Whitmore that she was a collaborator?’
He lifted his hand and stroked the back of her head comfortingly. The sun hung overhead, like a spotlight picking out just the two of them. He glanced down at her and paused in his stride, a look of sadness darkening his eyes.
‘Listen to me, Alicja. Go to your mother. Tell her I say it’s over between us. She has no reason to fear me. But . . .’ He placed a hand under Alicja’s chin and lifted it gently, so that she was forced to fix her gaze on his, ‘I think you should be careful. Your mother takes risks.’
A memory slid to the surface of Alicja’s mind. Of two diamonds hidden in her mother’s lapels in the forest and the gang of feral women ready to cut her guts open to find them. But still Mama had denied their existence.
‘Alicja,’ Scholz murmured, ‘take care. She could be a danger to you.’
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