The Dressmaker's War

by Mary Chamberlain

  “And Thomas,” Mr. Wallis said, “tell us about the baby. Thomas.”

  Ada gripped the witness box, braced herself.

  “Was he born dead or alive?”

  She didn’t often cry, but she felt the tears welling behind her eyes, knew that the mention of him would send them cascading to the floor. She’d never talked about Thomas, never even said his name out loud, not till this trial, when she’d had to tell Mr. Wallis about him, and everything, everything that went on in her war, a woman’s war, far away from London and home, not her mother’s war, You’ve no idea the suffering we went through. The loneliness, the degradation, the pain. It was far away from the soldiers’ war with their heroes and cripples and Mentioned in dispatches, meritorious action in the face of the enemy. No one had ever talked about her war. It was as if it had never happened. No one had known or listened till now. No one had cared.

  She paused, looked at the jury. Was that sympathy in their eyes? Did even one of them think, You could have been my daughter. Just an ordinary girl, caught up in war. Alone. In a tragedy.

  “Have you ever lived with death?” she said. “Not the everyday death of ordinary times. But death, every day, every hour. To live and slave day after day. To work with cadavers belching gas and fumes, to watch skin shrivel and ferment, to wash flesh and feel it fall away into your hands, like I had, in that geriatric home.”

  They were listening, Ada could tell. The words emerged from somewhere deep.

  “I was nineteen, twenty years old,” she said. “I couldn’t vote or marry. But I could be held prisoner, forced to work, to sew and clean up after people who hated me. The enemy. To sleep with the stench of death, dream of rot and decay.” She groped for words. “Do you know anything about what can happen to a girl abandoned in the middle of war? What that would do to somebody like me?”

  One of the men nodded when she spoke, looked at her straight. She’d caught his eye. She turned to the man on his left, spoke to him direct, too.

  “Death was inside me, and all round me. I lived and breathed it, carried it with me like bones in a butcher’s bag. Death was within me.”

  Ada kept her gaze steady. “Within me,” she said. “I carried death within me. And I gave birth in a factory of death.”

  She was crying. She’d left her handkerchief behind. She wiped her nose on the cusp of her hand. “But I wanted to give birth to life,” she said. “I wanted to hope, to live. In all of this hell, I wanted to produce life, a soul, a living mass of tissue and fiber and blood and love. I wanted to create beauty. Have you ever needed so much to try to do that?”

  Mr. Wallis was watching her, listening to the passion in her words.

  “Have you ever needed life so bad that you would conquer death to find it?”

  She didn’t know where these words had come from, except from far inside, love and emotion buried so deep she never thought she’d see them again. She didn’t expect them to believe her, to care. Their faces were cold as flint. Yet she wanted, she had, to speak for Thomas. He was no bastard, but a beloved child.

  “And then?” Mr. Wallis prompted.

  “Thomas lived,” Ada said. “He lived in my mind. He lives there still. Not a day went by when I didn’t see my son, didn’t touch the down of his head, smell his newborn scent. I watched him grow up, I sang him songs. She was as beautiful as a butterfly and proud as a queen. I saw him take his first steps, heard his first words. I kissed his cuts better, dabbed witch hazel on his bumps. My son, Thomas, kept me alive. Nobody can tell me he was born dead. He is alive. To me.”

  She looked at the men of the jury, one by one, the bald man with the demob suit, the squat man with red hair in a tweed jacket, the foreman with his handlebar mustache in a gray coat and army ribbons. She sat tall and dignified. She was not a tart, no common prostitute. She was a woman whose pain drilled to the reach of the earth, who had screamed to the horizon. A woman who had survived, despite everything.

  “And Dachau?” Mr. Wallis said.

  “Dachau,” Ada said. Dachau. She talked. She told them what her war had been like, about the town of Dachau, and its women, the beatings and starvation; she told them of what she thought then was the factory, of the stench from its chimneys, the gases from its pores, walking in the realm of the wretchedness of evil.

  “What happened to Stanislaus von Lieben? Did you ever see him again?”

  “He was in Dachau,” Ada said. “The town of Dachau. At the end of the war.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “I didn’t know at the time. I only learned later. Business, I was told.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. I saw him. Crossing a street. I ran after him, but he’d disappeared. There were too many people.”

  “You were sure it was him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Stanley Lovekin. What makes you think he and Stanislaus von Lieben were one and the same?”

  Ada began to fiddle with her cuff, unraveling a yarn that dangled like a coiled spring. “I recognized him,” she said. “He had the same voice, only without an accent. Except when Stanislaus got excited, his accent went, and he spoke sometimes like a Londoner. I wondered, even then.”

  “Did he look the same?”

  “He was a bit fatter,” she said. “Lost some hair. But his eyes were the same color.”

  “Anything else?”

  Ada rolled her weight over onto the side of one shoe. Hard to admit this, given what Scarlett had said, but she had to convince the jury she was right.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Please tell the jury what made you so sure Stanley Lovekin and Stanislaus von Lieben were one and the same.”

  A swarm of heat circled her neck, threw her cheeks into florid, red flushes. She licked her lips, swallowed. Didn’t want to say the word, but Mr. Wallis said she must. Shouldn’t be embarrassed.

  “He was circumcised,” she said. “He never said he was Jewish. I mean, it’s not only Jews who get circumcised. But Stanley was. So was Stanislaus. And not many men are.” She bit back the words, but they tumbled out. “That I know of.”

  The foreman was scowling, and the man in the demob suit, the one she thought was probably a Baptist, spluttered.

  “Didn’t mean to cause offense,” she said, looking at them.

  “Anything else?”

  “He told me he’d been in Namur when the Germans invaded,” she said, “with someone else. He called her an empty-headed tart. That was me.”

  “He hadn’t recognized you?”

  “He said I reminded him of her. But I’d changed, too. War does that to you. I have to wear glasses now. I’d dyed my hair, too. Blond. I was thinner. He was drunk.”

  “And how did you feel when he told you this?”

  “It was like he pulled a trigger,” Ada said. “All those years of the war at Dachau, the loss of Thomas, my baby, our baby, coming back here, the rejection. Years of work and misery and abandonment. It all blew out, like a bazooka.”

  Ada was breathing hard, gripping the handrail of the witness box, her knuckles glowing white through the magnolia skin.

  “And what happened next? What were you thinking?”

  “He’d been drinking, heavily. Called me names. Shocking. Denied he’d put me in the family way. Insulted me.”

  “How?”

  “He said I was a tart. Only I never was,” Ada said, looking hard at the foreman. “I never was a prostitute. But that’s what he took me for.”

  “And?”

  “I thought then that perhaps that’s what Stanislaus had wanted me to do. In Paris. For him. It made sense. It was his idea all along. He never loved me. He knew Gino Messina, before the war, during the war, only something happened and his plans fell apart.”

  “And then what?”

  “I wanted to run away, that night, but I knew he’d find me, or tell Gino. They had spies, that’s what they told me. I’d be done for then. I thought, It’s him or me.
That’s what I thought. And he was out cold. I couldn’t stop myself. I turned on the gas. It was the only way to get free of him, and of Gino, to save myself.”

  There, she’d admitted it again. But he’d asked for it. Couldn’t they understand that?

  “Don’t you see? He drove me to it. He insulted me. He”—she hesitated, but she had to say it—“he abused me, assaulted me. He had raped me. I couldn’t think straight.”

  The jury foreman raised his eyebrows, and the man in the demob suit adjusted his tie. The judge peered at her over his glasses, nodded to Mr. Wallis to continue.

  “Did you see Stanislaus’s passport?” Mr. Wallis said.

  “He didn’t have one,” Ada said, “not a British one. He had some kind of papers, but they were stolen ones.”

  Stanislaus and Stanley. One and the same. Her knees buckled beneath her and she sank to the floor, her face streaked with tears, her nose running. The policeman helped her up.

  “Thank you, Miss Vaughan,” Mr. Wallis said. He smiled at her, a beam of pride, affection almost. Well done, she read it there, in his eyes. Well done. Provocation. Slow-burning provocation. Grossly. Insulting. Assault.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY Ada looked again into the public gallery. Perhaps today she’d be lucky. But the people on the front bench were the same strangers who had been there all the days before. Her mother wasn’t coming, would never come, she knew that now.

  It was Mr. Harris-Jones’s turn to question her. He’ll play dirty, Mr. Wallis said. It’s his job. She’d told her story. Wasn’t that enough? The jury had to believe her. They’d heard the truth now. Manslaughter. Three years. Maybe four. Good behavior.

  “Dachau,” Harris-Jones said. “You weren’t actually in the concentration camp, were you, Miss Vaughan?”

  “No,” Ada said. “I worked in the town, not the camp, in the house of the commandant.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Obersturmbannführer Weiss. Then, after he left, Obersturmbannführer Weiter.”

  “The nature of your work there?”

  “It was forced labor. Day and night. Sewing. Washing. Ironing.”

  “Nothing strenuous then?”

  Ada glared at him. “Have you ever done housework?” she said. “Have you ever scrubbed and rinsed heavy linen sheets, wrung them out by hand, hung them on the line? Ironed them?”

  He smirked. “You’re talking the kind of work that every married woman in England does as her duty to her husband and family.”

  “No,” Ada said, “it was more than that. I spent all day with my arms in scalding water and borax, all night sewing and mending with almost nothing to eat.” But the men in the jury wouldn’t understand that. It wasn’t men’s work, that.

  “The more you tell me, Miss Vaughan,” Harris-Jones said, still smirking at the jury, “the more normal it sounds.”

  “I ruined my eyesight. I nearly starved. I barely slept. I was cold, alone.”

  “But you didn’t starve, Miss Vaughan,” he said. “You didn’t die. You weren’t in the concentration camp. Those poor wretches knew the nature of forced labor, of starvation. How many was it died at Dachau? Do you even know?”

  He faced the jury, spun round on his heel to Ada. “Upwards of thirty-two thousand documented deaths. Thirty-two thousand people. And you’re complaining about a little borax and poor food.”

  He turned once more to the jury. “The Germans eat a lot of sauerkraut,” he said. “Pickled cabbage. Can’t stand the stuff myself, but Captain Cook took it on his explorations. Not a single sailor died from scurvy on his expeditions. Not one.”

  Pivoted back to Ada, like a cuckoo in a clock. “Your war was rather easy, wasn’t it, Miss Vaughan?”

  “No. It was hard work, hard labor. On cabbage soup, nothing more.”

  “Did you try to escape?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was locked in my room. There were bars at the window. Where would I go?”

  “Did they ever let you out?”

  “I was let out to do the laundry. Hang it on the line. Empty my bucket.”

  “And why didn’t you run?”

  “I was guarded,” Ada said, “all the time.” Not that Anni would have stopped her, but she didn’t say. Anyway, where would she have gone? She’d have been captured in no time and shot.

  “You performed your duties well?”

  “I was punished if I didn’t.”

  “How?”

  “The belt. I was beaten.”

  “You did nothing to resist? Fight back against the Germans?”

  “How could I?” Ada said, adding, “I tried.”

  “How did you try, Miss Vaughan?”

  She puffed air out of her lips, breathed it back in. Her hands were sticky. One of her suspenders had worked free, and her stocking was drooping at the front, cutting across her thigh.

  “I’d try to contaminate the clothes,” she said. “I’d put them on before I handed them over, rub them against my skin so flakes would stick in the seams and the weave. I knew they were disgusted by me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I put rose hips in the gussets and gathers of Frau Weiter’s clothes.” Ada turned to the jury again. “She wore dirndl skirts and blouses, so there were lots of creases. It made her sore.”

  He laughed then. Harris-Jones laughed. “Do you see, gentlemen of the jury? While our boys were fighting Hitler, sacrificing their lives in the cause of freedom, Ada Vaughan was trying on clothes and putting itching powder in the laundry.” He turned to Ada. “Well done, Miss Vaughan. That made a big difference to the war effort.”

  A church bell struck outside, a sonorous gong gong. St. Sepulchre’s. When will you pay me, say the bells of Old Bailey. She counted. Twelve o’clock. The judge said nothing. She only heard the scritch of his bristles as he rubbed his hand against his chin. She shifted her weight. The thick stockings, H.M. PRISON HOLLOWAY stamped across the top, itched her calves, and she lifted one foot and rubbed it against the other leg. The laces on her left shoe had come undone. He was making her look small, mocking her.

  “It wasn’t like that.” Ada had had enough. “You don’t know what it was like. I was their slave. At their mercy. Locked away. Day in, day out. No one to talk to. No hope. No escape. Hard labor. Really hard. Have you ever been a slave? Have you? I was by myself,” Ada said, staring at Harris-Jones. “I did what I could. What would you have done?”

  “I’m sure you did your best, Miss Vaughan.” Harris-Jones’s voice was laden with irony. “I’m sure you did.”

  He flicked through the papers on his desk, pulled one free of its folder and put it, facedown, next to him. She wished he’d move on, talk about Stanley Lovekin, or Stanislaus, what he was like, what a bastard he was.

  “Could you tell me, Miss Vaughan, how you came to be at the commandant’s house?”

  “I don’t know,” Ada said. “I was taken out one day and driven there.”

  “Did you go voluntarily?”

  “I had no choice. Nothing I did was voluntary.”

  “What can you tell me of Herr Weiss?”

  His scrawny face flooded her vision. She could feel his trembling fingers enclosing hers. She shuddered and flicked her wrists to shake off the sensation.

  “He was one of the old men we nursed.”

  “What was the nature of this nursing?”

  “We made sure the old people were clean and fed, given their medicines. The usual.”

  “Was there anything special about Herr Weiss that caused you to treat him differently?”

  “He had been a schoolteacher. He had a lot of respect, from the guards, especially. And he spoke English.” Why all these questions about Herr Weiss? She looked at Mr. Wallis for guidance, but he was concentrating on his notes. “He asked me to speak English with him, so he could improve it.”

  “Did you take advantage of this?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did y
ou exploit his attention?”

  “He taught me German in return.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No,” Ada said.

  “You didn’t give him services of a more intimate nature?”

  He was guessing. He must be. Ada had never said, not to anyone, ever.

  “Answer the question, Miss Vaughan,” the barrister said.

  “He was a bit frisky sometimes,” Ada said. “Forced me to hold him while he did his business.”

  “Did his business. Did you enjoy that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He was well connected, was he not? In Dachau. In the Nazi Party.”

  “He was a relative of Martin Weiss, the commandant.”

  “And did you ask him to get you moved into the household of the commandant, in exchange for sexual favors?”

  “No,” Ada said.

  —

  No. She had never asked. “Life can be easier for you, meine Nönnerl. Did you know that?” Whispered in her ear so she felt his breath warm on her cheek, his bristles rough against her skin.

  What was her life now but the steady drip of death among the dying?

  “Just one small favor,” he’d said, “and it can be arranged.” Did she agree? What choice was there?

  His flesh hung loose over his bones, like a coat too big for him.

  “And you,” he said, picking up his stick and flicking the hem of her habit. “Take off your clothes. Let me watch.”

  His skin was oily, rubbed against hers, rubbed into hers. He was kissing her, crinkled tongue in her mouth. She lay still.

  “I won’t hurt,” Herr Weiss said. “Adelheid. Ada. How can I give you pleasure? Tell me what to do.”

  She wanted to say, Leave me alone. She didn’t know what he meant. His lips were close to hers, dribbling over her.

  “I forget,” he said. “You are a nun. But you’re not a virgin, are you, meine Nönnlein?”

  She felt him as he thrust into her, heard him grinding his teeth, concentrating. His body was soft and heavy on top of her.