by P. G. Glynn
“No! He can’t have done. You can’t go anywhere, Mama – not without me.”
“You have Hugo and Marie,” she said gently. “They are now your family. I am more or less obsolete.”
“That’s nonsense! You know it is. You’re as necessary as ever to me and to … to all of us. We can’t function without you and have no idea how to.”
“Then I’ve failed my children.”
“You’ve done no such thing. Stop speaking so fatalistically … and if it’s Dr Novak’s views you’ve been expressing, then let’s get another doctor in.”
“Theodor was only telling me what I already knew,” she told him, stroking the hand that was holding hers, “so we’d just be wasting time and I’ve none to waste. There’s the added fact that, although I’m loath to leave my dear ones and the home I’ve lived in for so long, I’m ready for my next adventure. Yes, I welcome death in some respects. I shall be with your Papa and with Emil and Carla … and we three, along with Elsa and the other relatives who’ve gone on ahead, will be watching over you … your guardian angels, in a sense.”
Taking a deep breath, Otto said: “You sound so sure that there’s a heaven.”
“I sound sure because I am sure. Sometimes I can almost remember how it felt to be there.”
“How it felt?”
“Yes,” she said serenely. “We leave heaven in order to be born and return there when our earthly toil is over. Just as the world is circular, so is our sequence of births and deaths, with the soul returning again and again cloaked in flesh. Souls have their seasons … and shed their bodies just as deciduous trees shed their leaves.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Perhaps I’ve dreamed it … or perhaps I’ve entered my season of All Knowledge. Otto, if I promise you something, will you make me a promise?” When he, dumbly, nodded she said: “Wherever I am and in whatever form in future, I shall still be your mother … and near you when most needed. Do you believe me?” Stricken, he nodded again, after which she told him: “I want you to stop underestimating Ludwig. People who have given him and his evil regime far less provocation than you’ve given them are disappearing off the streets, or even from their homes after dark, never to be heard of again. Don’t blithely assume that you’re immune to bad fortune – or that you can go on as you are without serious risk to life and limb. I wouldn’t describe you, and doubt you’d describe yourself, as exceptionally brave … but you’ll have to be if you are taken to one of those camps the Nazis are building all over the place. Shooting is for the fortunate, by my understanding. The less fortunate – the Communists, the Socialists, the Jews, the journalists and other freethinkers seen as true enemies of the Reich – are killed much more slowly, much more painfully. And once I am no longer here to deter Ludwig by my presence I believe you’ll be more than ever at risk. So will you promise to reflect on what I’ve said, Otto, and to do your best to mend your ways before it’s too late?”
He promised, scared stiff suddenly. Unsure whether he was more scared of losing his mother or of Nazi torture, he then pleaded with her: “Don’t leave me, Mama! I need you here.”
“You have all you need in your wife and son,” she told him. “If life is indeed a play, the last acts for you and your loved ones have yet to be staged. Treat Marie and Hugo well … and remember that I’ll be watching over you right up to the final curtain, after which will come our reunion. I love you … and my love is endless.”
Tears spilled on to his cheeks as he told her, for the first time in his life: “Oh, and I love you, Mama, too!”
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It was autumn before Ludwig came home again, but Marta had succeeded in holding on until then. She had done so against all odds according to Theodor Novak, who said that she was making medical history. Quite simply, Marta refused to die before talking to Ludwig one last time.
She talked to him in her private drawing room, where she sat by the window with a view across to the Schneekoppe. He looked shocked she noticed as – fresh from his journey – he registered the degree of her frailty. “Are you ill, Mama?” he asked her, sitting in the chair opposite hers. “If you are, someone should have sent for me and I’d have come home sooner.”
“Could you have been spared from your … duties?”
“That’s unfair! You know that I would always put you before my other responsibilities. But you seemed displeased with me when I was home last, so rather than incur further displeasure I stayed away longer than I usually do.”
“How thoughtful of you! Tell me, Ludwig, how are Lenka and your Fuehrer – or am I referring to them in the wrong order?”
“Of course not!” Ludwig clenched his fists. “Lenka is my wife and comes before Adolf Hitler. She’s cured – yes, completely! – and wanted to come home with me. I felt, though, that it might be wisest to come without her, at least for the time being. You see how I consider your feelings?”
“That is … gratifying. Will you always consider them, even when I’m … elsewhere?”
“You are ill!” His face creased into an agonised expression. “Mama … what’s the matter and why in God’s name wasn’t I sent for?”
“There’s no need to bring God into this, except in the sense that He’s calling me home … and that I’m glad to go.”
“No! Don’t say such a thing. We’ll get a second opinion. Old Novak knows nothing. I’ll bring in a specialist from Germany … ”
“I have said it … and you won’t, Ludwig. I’m having no Nazis across my threshold – none, that is, other than the son who has turned his back on everything his family stands for.”
“I’d never do that. You just don’t understand.”
“My understanding is that you’re still transferring Berger money into Nazi coffers. Do you deny it?” When he was silent she said: “You can’t, since Czechoslovak nationals need a special permit from the National Bank to transfer any sum above one thousand crowns to another country – and such permits are virtually unobtainable by law-abiding citizens. Yet I have it on good authority that you’re transferring funds without any difficulty. You’re breaking our laws, Ludwig, as well as my heart – and will probably succeed in bankrupting J.A. Berger & Sons into the bargain. So I can only conclude that fascism and your Nazi masters mean more to you than I do.”
“It was quite wrong of my bank manager to … ”
“So will you have the dear old soul tortured for talking to me, as he happens to be a Jew? Oh, Ludwig, don’t make me despair of you!”
“Mama … your eyes have simply not been opened as mine have been by my Fuehrer. If I could just help you to see the future as I see it, thanks to him, you’d send money too. Hitler is a man in a million and one who … ”
“ … in order to expand into Russia must first invade and take over Czechoslovakia. If he is allowed to do that, our lives will be taken over along with our beloved homeland and the life we have lived will shrink into so much water under the bridge. Why can’t you see this? It is you, not I, who’s blind – too blind to realise that, far from being some beneficent saviour, Hitler is a piffling little dictator who will let nothing and nobody stand in the way of his Master Race. He’s so ruthless and unscrupulous that no-one is safe – no, not even you. Heaven help you when you’re of no further use to him because that’s when you’ll discover that I was right all along and you were wrong. I don’t envy you that discovery, especially if it comes too late to save your gullible skin. Will you answer me, truthfully, one last thing, Ludwig?”
“I’ll try,” he said stiffly, “although I’ll have you know that had anyone else spoken to me as you’ve just done I’d have had to report them.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Marta’s last energy was spent. She had no will to live left. “Simply tell me this: have I been a good mother to you, all these years?”
“Beyond question! No man could have wished for a better one.”
Her eyes were closed and she seemed barely to be breathing. He needed to lean
forward to hear her: “Then all I ask in return is that, should a testing time come, you’ll respond by being an equally good son. Have I your word, as a Berger?”
“You have, Mama.”
“Amen!”
40
Franz felt nothing but contempt for Ludwig. The feeling had been especially strong during Marta’s interment, when Ludwig’s loud sobs disrupted the ceremony and upset everybody. To Franz’s mind his nephew had been crying crocodile tears, since a man who could go so against his mother’s wishes in her lifetime had no business to be sobbing upon her death. But he had wondered, back then, whether the tears meant Ludwig was set on repentance.
Just one week later he knew they did not, for Ludwig was strutting about like a caricature of his Nazi master and behaving as if he now had carte blanche to do as he wanted with the family’s assets and factory. It was hard to believe he had so recently been a quivering jelly.
“Let me check whether I understand you correctly,” Franz said to him in Marta’s study, where he had found Ludwig rummaging through papers on her desk. “You’re suggesting that to raise capital we mortgage the machinery and dock our employees’ wages by ten per cent?”
“I am not suggesting this! I am enforcing it. I was never in favour in the first place of rewarding our workers as we did.”
“I see,” said Franz equably. “So you disagreed with our policy of paying top whack to attract the top work force, who in turn produce yarn that commands a premium, there being less breakages in weaving with ours than with yarns of lesser quality? You should have said sooner that you disagreed! Had you said, and had we listened, we’d almost certainly have shared the fate of neighbouring mills and no longer be in business.”
“Rubbish!” Ludwig’s spittle sprayed over his uncle. “Your sarcasm carries no weight with me. It cannot be sound policy to fork out excessively.”
“Can’t it? Then how do you account for our continued existence while all around us others in our industry are sinking?”
“You’re exaggerating. You must be. I haven’t heard of wholesale bankruptcies in the linen industry.”
“Why would you have done? Your heart is in Berlin, not in linen.”
“I don’t have to listen to this. As a Kadlec you can’t talk down to a Berger in respect of a Berger business. You’ve got away with too much for too long, but now I’m taking stock … and as the eldest son have every right to do as I decide in respect of J.A. Berger’s various concerns. So I shall put the mortgaging of the machinery in hand immediately.”
“Do so, by all means.”
That stopped Ludwig in his tracks. “You’re agreeing with me?”
“I am, as it happens. In fact, I’ve pre-empted you in the matter. Our machinery is mortgaged to the hilt already.”
“It can’t be! How dare you try your trickery? To my certain knowledge that apparatus was bought outright.”
“It was indeed,” Franz agreed, crossing his legs and leaning back in his sister’s seat. “We paid for it comfortably from just six months’ profits. But our years of plenty are past, Ludwig. These are hard times we’re living in.”
“You mean that you’ve mismanaged everything! It’s your geriatric management that I have to thank for such a scandal.”
“There’s no need to thank me. Just pass on the message to Franz Xaver Schwarz at your Nazi Treasury that there has been a drying up of Berger money.”
As Adolf Hitler’s Adviser on Czechoslovak Affairs outside the framework of the Abwehr, with special attachment to Herr Schwarz, Ludwig was well equipped to pass messages on to him but had no intention of passing this one on. The Party needed to be able to rely on its regular income and Ludwig’s stature grew with each contribution. Pacing the floor in his anger, but stopping long enough to thump the desk between him and his uncle with both fists simultaneously, he accused: “You’ve done this deliberately in a misguided attempt to thwart me. And no doubt it was you, too, who found out about my transference of funds and got me into hot water with Mama. None of which augurs well for you – or for old Hochenheimer, who is obviously in your pocket.”
“Jakob and I understand each other, yes.” Franz eyed his nephew wisely. “So, are we both to be eliminated – he because he’s Jewish and I because I still have the temerity to believe in civil liberty?”
“Were it left to me, I’d pull the trigger personally. Neither you, nor that kike Hochenheimer, are fit to inhabit the same earth as my Fuehrer. But my orders don’t as yet include such pleasures, so I must bide my time until they do.”
“Your poor mother would despair of you … and in Marta’s shoes I’d have disowned you long ago. Why weep at her funeral if so soon after it you are behaving in a way that, if she were not already dead, would have sent her prematurely to her grave?”
“That’s a wicked thing to say! It would have been an odd son who didn’t show his grief … and Mama wasn’t as opposed as you think to my loyalties. She even shared them, to some degree.”
In his shock Franz dislodged and almost lost his dentures. “That’s calumny of the worst order, with your mother not here to negate such twaddle. I’ll have you know that had she not died as she did, in your presence, she’d intended taking steps … ”
“How would you know her intentions?” Ludwig butted in with a raised fist.
“Because she was my sister and we discussed such things. Shall I go on?” When Ludwig made no attempt to stop him he said: “It was Marta’s intention, if she failed in her last-ditch attempt to make you see sense, to add a codicil to her Will, disowning you. She was, as you know full well, almost more opposed than I am to the dangerous buffoons you’ve pledged your allegiance to. So don’t ever suggest again that she was in any degree pro-Nazi. Get it into your oafish head that your mother was wholly opposed to your fanaticism.”
“You’re lying. Mama would never have disowned me. And while she disagreed with my Party’s attitude to Jews, she would have come in time to see that additional living space is a reasonable need.”
“Would she?” Franz wished that he were a younger man, strong enough physically to knock some sense into this cretin. “Would she, indeed, when Hitler openly refers to Czechoslovakia as ‘Russia’s thrust-out arm’? Grow up, Ludwig, and start seeing things as they are. Or would it suit you if your Fuehrer, when he looks here for his extra space before looking farther east, were to requisition Schloss Berger in the name of his cause? Is the castle perhaps already earmarked as his Bohemian headquarters?”
Onkel Franz was speaking of what should have been Ludwig’s inheritance. But instead of leaving Schloss Berger to her eldest son, as she should have done, Mama had tied it up for Hugo in trust. Was it any wonder that Ludwig felt bitter about this … or that his grief had subsided during the reading of the Will? Right to the very end Otto had been her favourite and she had made no secret of her favouritism, even to the extent of bypassing Ludwig in favour of Otto’s son. What a kick in the groin that had been … and what an opportunity was now presenting itself by which to turn the tables on Otto a little! Later, Ludwig would remove the white gloves he wore as an S.S. officer so that these would not be stained when he turned the tables altogether, but meanwhile he could take huge pleasure in Onkel Franz’s idea. “What a brainwave!” he said. “Why had I not thought of it before? At the right time we shall take over the castle, of course. How fitting that when Hitler reaches Czechoslovakia on our drive east he avails himself of Berger facilities!”
+++++
Otto was glad he had told Mama that he loved her. He would not have wanted her to die without hearing this from him, even though she must have known it all along. It had needed saying … and he had not realised until after she died just how much she meant to him. Nor had he realised the degree to which the family revolved round her – the extent to which she held it together. While she was there everyone knew the score and their place in the pecking order. Now, without her, everything seemed to have been fragmented, with no-one sure of their role any
more and with Ludwig attempting at every turn to throw his weight about as the eldest son and supposed ‘head’ of the household. Fortunately his dirty work in Berlin kept taking him off but then suddenly, always without warning, he was home again and trying to control things. As often as not he brought Lenka with him and the atmosphere in Schloss Berger then became still more oppressive, with her and Marie as well as Otto and Ludwig permanently at loggerheads. Where it would all end was anybody’s guess but Otto was doing his best to keep his promise to be more circumspect.
He also took Marie travelling at every opportunity, which was how they came to be in Vienna currently, with Hugo due to join them for Easter. Even here he missed Mama, however, and wished he had been a better son to her. Oh to have her back, even temporarily, so that he could talk to her more … and hear her talking! As much as anything Otto missed the sound of her voice, the reassurance of her loving presence. It was terrible to think that, in this lifetime at least, he would never see her again.
And, with a Nazi in the family, the world had become more dangerous since Mama’s death. Hitler’s lawlessness was now so widespread that Otto was constantly reminded of the power of Ludwig’s friends. Opposing one’s brother was one thing, opposing a whole vicious regime quite another. Otto rather regretted some of the past things he had said and yet what kind of man would he be if he never spoke out against the Fuehrer’s tactics and his Final Solution, which would involve the mass murder of all European Jews? As well as saving his skin – or trying to – he had to be able to live with himself.
Thankfully, there were still pleasures in life. He had a wife who was, if anything, even more beautiful now than when they honeymooned here in Vienna. Marie had a bloom and maturity that gave her an extra dimension, an extra sensuousness. Her figure was girlish but for the luscious breasts that gave him such delight both in bed and out of it and over the years she had acquired a finesse and savoir-faire that added to the attractions she had had as a young actress. How long ago those days at the Tavistock seemed! They had now concertinaed into the dimensions of a dream, whereas Otto’s marriage was satisfactorily real and his darling wife surprised him with her wantonness at times.