‘Too cold for you?’ he turned to look at her, brushed the snow from her hat.
She laughed up at him. His lashes, his hair, were covered in white. ‘You look like a snowman.’
‘Then I won’t melt until Spring,’ he joined her laugh.
They had laughed a great deal together, despite everything, despite the fact that on the tail of each laugh a lump rose in her throat with Leo for a name. Despite the fact that each ramble seemed to cross the path of a patrol of uniformed youths, arrogantly strutting their possession of the city. She always found herself scanning their faces, half afraid, half in hope that one of them might be Leo.
And each walk always seemed to abut on murder: Foreign Minister Rathenau’s almost opposite Johannes’s childhood home, Karl Liebknecht’s, Rosa Luxemburg’s in the Landswehr Kanal, the nineteen innocent victims of the Kösliner Strasse riot, and so it went on.
Anna suddenly stopped in her tracks. They were approaching the wood where all those years ago Leo had come upon the dead woman. ‘I don’t think I want to go too far today. Just in case,’ she looked at Johannes helplessly, ‘After all it’s New Year’s Day, and perhaps Leo will…’
‘Of course,’ Johannes wound his arm round her shoulder, drew her close, kissed her on the cheek. ‘Poor Anna,’ he murmured. ‘The trials of motherhood.’
‘Don’t mock me, Johannes,’ she mumbled, the tears rising in her eyes. The frost bit at them.
‘I wasn’t mocking,’ he turned her off the main street into a path which would lead them back past the lake to the house. ‘I wouldn’t mock.’
They walked silently for a few minutes, pausing at the top of the incline to look at the hooded trees, the banked patterns the wind had traced.
‘You know we were planning to leave tomorrow, Anna,’ he squeezed her fingers. ‘Obviously, you’re not ready to go yet.’
There was a slight question in his tone.
‘I couldn’t now, Johannes,’ she turned away from his scrutiny. ‘I have to wait for him. But you must go, I understand that,’ she was surprised at her own alacrity. But yes, she did want Johannes to go. The pretence of being able to think about anything other than Leo made too much of a demand on her.
Johannes laughed oddly.
She put her arm through his to lessen the intent of her words. ‘It’s just that I’m not very good company at the moment.’
‘Would you like me to stay on with you?’
She shook her head, tried a smile which transformed itself into a grimace. She turned away from him, began to trudge down the slope. The truth was that she didn’t like him to see her in her maternal disarray, the added weight of him. She had grown so used to contending with Leo on her own.
In the distance, a child shrieked happily as his sled careened down the slope. She saw him tumble off it, saw a woman pick him up into her arms and throw him gaily into the air.
‘Don’t cry, Anna.’ Johannes had caught up with her.
She hadn’t realised she was.
‘I’ll go tomorrow. I realise it will be easier for you to deal with Leo if I’m not here. He doesn’t exactly approve of me,’ he chuckled.
She almost said it then, almost told him, ‘but he thinks you’re his father,’ but she bit her lips, mumbling instead, ‘It will take a lot of convincing as it is, if I’m to bring him back to Munich as Bettina advises.’
They walked on, past the woman and the laughing boy.
‘But you think he’ll come back?’
Johannes nodded. Then after a moment, he added, ‘You know, Anna, Leo’s almost a man now. If he doesn’t return or agree to what you suggest, it’s not the end of the world. His world. It’s an age for young men,’ he added grimly.
She baulked at that, but she kept her counsel. There was no point trying to convey to Johannes that Leo was still just a child, stubbornly proud as he had always been, a wrongheaded boy.
Instead she said, trying to sound confident, ‘And after I’ve dragged him back to Seehafen, we’ll put things in motion, so that we can join Klaus and Bettina abroad.’
Johannes wrapped her hand in both of his and gazed into the distance. ‘One step at a time, Anna. One step at a time.’
Something in his voice made her pause and look up at him. His eyes under the shadow of the thick lashes had a strange, faraway look in them, an unblinking calm. And she didn’t know what it was that made him wrap her in his arms and kiss her, just then, in the midst of that expanse of snowy whiteness. But his lips lulled her and for the briefest of moments, she felt the brush of a butterfly’s wings, sniffed the fragrance of warmed grass and wild herbs. She had a keen, sharp, image of Seehafen, that grassy knoll where they had first played out their love so many years ago.
Then the whiteness obliterated it.
‘Oh, Johannes,’ she murmured, clutching at his hand.
*****
When she looked back on the days which marked the turn of that year, Anna always thought they had passed with an almost explosive rapidity, events piling up with a doom-laden haste which defied reflection. In the midst of them, however, time seemed to move with an uncanny slowness, morning merging into afternoon, afternoon into evening and sleepless night, with only the tick of the clock to punctuate the waiting. It was especially the case after Johannes had left.
He had gone as planned, the day after the New Year gathering. January 2, 1935. He had kissed her goodbye, held her for a long second, and then proceeded down the snow-laden path, turning only once to wave.
Looking at him, his soft hat low on his forehead, his eyes the only spot of warmth in that frozen landscape, his lips curled in a smile so tender that she couldn’t remember its likeness in him, she had almost called after him, almost run to cling to him. But she hadn’t. She had simply returned to her chair by the window and waited, alert only to the sound of the bell, the ring of the telephone. And these were never for her.
Then, one afternoon, she wasn’t certain which one it was, Bettina had come in with a crash of the door, a thumping of bags on floor, a piercing call which shattered the customary quiet of the house. Anna had run to her side, Klaus just behind her.
‘He’s gone,’ Bettina had announced, looking directly at her, as if the fault were somehow hers.
For a moment, Anna had no idea whom she meant. Then it came to her.
‘Max?’ she mouthed.
‘Yes, Max,’ Bettina was screaming. ‘I’ve just been to his room and he’s not there. Hasn’t been there all week.’ She marched into the living room, threw a book off the chair onto the floor with a violent gesture. ‘Not all week,’ she swerved round again to confront them. The tears were streaming down her face. ‘And he hasn’t phoned, hasn’t left a message.’ She started to pummel Anna, then Klaus, with limp fists, impotently. ‘I knew we should have left sooner, knew it,’ she collapsed into a chair, covering her face.
Klaus met Anna’s eyes helplessly. He put his hand on Bettina’s shoulder.
‘Have you spoken to any of his friends, to Anita?’ he said after a moment.
She shook her head.
‘Well, then… He could easily be with them.’ He poured Bettina a glass of brandy, held it for her while she drank reluctantly. Then gesturing to Anna, he went off to telephone.
‘I’m sure he’s with one of his friends,’ it was Anna’s turn to put more certainty in her voice than she felt. ‘Max is responsible. He wouldn’t do anything silly.’
Bettina looked at her with stony eyes. ‘That’s precisely why I’m terrified, you idiot. He never lets this many days pass without making a sign.’ She leapt up from her chair, started to pace restlessly.
The tears rose to Anna’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bettina murmured. ‘It’s just that I’m at my wits end. I…’
‘I know,’ Anna mumbled.
Bettina stopped in front of her. ‘Of course you do, of course you do,’ she hugged her for a moment. ‘We left it too late Anna. I should have bullied them, bullied them all. All th
is fairness, letting them find their own feet, work out their own ideas. The times are too dangerous for that. The…’
‘Did you have any choice?’ Anna interrupted her. ‘They’re men now, as Johannes pointed out to me all too clearly.’
‘I could have forced them. Klaus wanted it. Wanted to go last year. I thought, oh I don’t know what I thought. I thought I could be useful. So I was useful to everyone except our own,’ she laughed strangely, a high pitched cry. ‘And because I was scared. Because I am scared. Another country. No one I know, powerless,’ she dropped her glass so that it fell on the floor and crashed into a thousand pieces. And first Leo, now Max,’ she covered her face.
‘I couldn’t get through to anyone,’ Klaus had come in without them hearing. ‘I’m going to go round to the factory. The shift should be finished soon.’ He glanced at his watch, ‘Then that bar, the little one in Wedding that Max always meets his friends in. Someone is bound to know something there.’
‘Be careful, Klaus,’ Bettina ran up to him, put a staying hand on his arm. ‘Don’t ask anything of the wrong people. You never know. You never…’
‘I’ll be alright,’ he pecked her awkwardly on the cheek. ‘Just try to stay calm.’
‘I’ll get you some broth,’ Anna murmured.
But when she came back with the tray, Bettina was nowhere to be seen. She rushed up to her study, but there was no sign of her there either. Then she heard a noise down the corridor from the bedroom. She knocked at the door, ‘Bettina?’ She pushed it open, saw her sister throwing clothes into a suitcase, another gaping open.
‘The moment he sets foot in this house, we’re leaving. Even if I have to pack him in this case,’ Bettina laughed shrilly. She hummed to herself in her off-key way as she flung dress after dress, jumper after jumper, into the case, then crunched it shut and started on another. ‘The first train to anywhere, whatever time it is.’
Anna stared at her for a moment and then with a shrug, began to help.
Klaus was able to find out nothing that evening, except that no one had seen Max for at least five days. Bettina hardly seemed to hear what he had to say. She carried on arranging, sorting, putting things into cases, into trunks, working through the night, hardly sleeping before she woke to begin again. She was like a trapped bird, battering her head against a windowpane, refusing to recognize its existence. When the house was packed, Max would return and the window would open. And if he didn’t, Anna thought, wishing the image hadn’t crystallized itself in her mind, she would flutter to the ground, spent.
It was two days later that the phone call came. For Klaus. About midday. She knew that because the sun had at last come out and was riding high in a cloudless sky. A Dr. Hildebrandt, a former pupil of Klaus’s at the hospital. Anna had taken the telephone and repeated the identification as she held out the receiver, before rejoining Bettina who was packing books into boxes.
Klaus came into them a few moments later and mumbled something about having to go out. It was only once he had put on his coat, that Bettina raised her head as if from a trance and rushed up to him.
‘It’s about Max, isn’t it?’ her face had the transparency of old porcelain.
‘I’m not sure,’ Klaus avoided her.
‘I’m coming with you,’ she pulled on her coat breathlessly, tucked her hair beneath her severe winter hat.
‘And I am, too,’ Anna followed suit, unwilling to be left behind.
Klaus shrugged. ‘You may not be allowed through.’
Bettina gazed straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard him.
The hospital was on the other side of the Spree, behind the Brandenburg Gate. It’s old brick buildings, clustered beneath bare trees, had the hush of a convent, a quietude to dispel the pain within.
A sister with an elaborate headdress pointed them to a building on the far side of the grounds. There Klaus asked for Dr. Hildebrandt. They were told to wait. The minutes ticked by until at last a thin man, his eyes hidden by thick spectacles, appeared. He shook Klaus vigorously by the hand, looked askance at Bettina and Anna, only offering them a perfunctory bow, before he drew Klaus aside, led him towards a series of stairs.
‘We wish to come with you, Dr. Hildebrandt,’ Bettina called after them.
‘In a moment, Frau Eberhardt,’ he dismissed her.
Bettina fumed, paced. But the men were back soon enough. Klaus’s face had a ghostly whiteness to it. He put his arm through Bettina’s.
‘Max has been involved in an accident,’ he murmured.
‘Yes, Frau Eberhardt. An accident.’ Dr. Hildebrandt silenced Bettina’s questions before they came with a stern look. ‘I’m happy to say he’s mending now.’ He gestured them across the courtyard.
The icy path glimmered in the sunlight, too bright after the gloom of the building. In her hurry, Bettina skidded, held on tightly to Klaus. There was a look of panic on her face.
At the door of the ward, Hildebrandt turned towards them again. His voice was gentler now. ‘Don’t be aghast by what you see. We don’t want to excite him. And only a few minutes today,’ he nodded at Klaus, held the door open for them.
They walked single file down the long, narrow room, banked by beds. Anna tried to keep her gaze on the windows, the tracery of trees and sunlight beyond. She didn’t want to see the frightened faces of these supine men, but they loomed towards her, their features arranging themselves into those of Leo’s. No. She fought off the thought.
At last Hildebrandt stopped in front of a door which led off the main ward. He ushered them through.
But for the eyes, the reclining figure on the bed could have been anyone. A bruised swollen face, cracked lips, a bandaged head and limbs, confronted them. Bettina gasped.
‘I’m afraid I’ve had a little set-to.’ It was Max’s tone, though the voice was hoarse. He was trying unsuccessfully to smile. ‘Soon be better the doctor tells me, though I suspect my career as a hero has been cut short. Sorry.’
‘You’re not to strain yourself, Max,’ Klaus murmured. ‘We’re happy, so happy to have found you.’
Bettina pulled a chair up to the bed, tried to take his bandaged hand, saw him flinch. ‘My poor darling. My poor, poor darling.’
Max’s eyes flickered, settled on Anna. He seemed to consider, then he said, ‘I had a message from Leo, Aunt. Didn’t get a chance to tell you.’
Anna’s heart leapt.
‘He says he won’t be back for a while. Not to worry.’ He moved uncomfortably in the bed. At a severe look from Klaus, Anna stilled her questions.
‘Thank you, Max,’ she mumbled.
Dr. Hildebrandt cleared his throat. ‘I think it would be best to leave Max to rest now. He needs his rest,’ he stressed, staring down a recalcitrant Bettina.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow, darling. I’ll bring chocolate, books, I’ll read to you, I’ll…’
‘Bettina,’ Klaus took her arm, turned briefly to his son, ‘You’re in good hands, Max. Rest well.’
It was only after they had got home, after they had greeted the little ones and shooed them off with Martha, after Anna had poured out coffee for a dazed and strangely silent Bettina, that Klaus conveyed to them what Hildebrandt had told him in confidence.
‘Max has been in the hospital for some four days now. He was brought in unconscious, suffering from exposure as well as beating, burns,’ he winced, lit his pipe with a shaking hand. He seemed to be about to say something else, then changed his mind. ‘It appears he was found in some barn on the outskirts of the city. Without his clothes. So no one knew who he was. Until yesterday when he came to.’
Bettina gasped. ‘Those bastards. It was those bastards. I knew it would come to this.’ She wrung her handkerchief.
‘Hildebrandt recognized the name, put two and two together and rang me.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But don’t start fulminating about Nazi’s in front of him, Bettina. He’s one of them. Though I think he’s still a doctor first.’
Bettina got up abruptl
y. ‘How long before he can come out of the hospital, Klaus?’
Klaus shrugged, ‘A week, two. I don’t know the exact extent of the damage.’
‘Right then. There isn’t much time. We must have everything ready. We’ll go to Switzerland first, tell Max it’s an enforced holiday. Or maybe England, he’ll prefer that,’ she started to pace in that restless way again. ‘I had a letter from Lady Charlotte, you remember, Anna, mother’s friend? We could stay with her, and then go on from there to America. We’ll put what we want to keep in storage and then when I cable you an address, Anna, you can ship things on and join us.’ Her voice had gathered in confidence.
‘And Leo?’ Anna murmured.
‘Oh, by that time Leo will have turned up somewhere. Just make sure you have all your papers ready.’
‘You’ll ask Max, again, won’t you, when it’s easier for him to speak, about what Leo said, about…’
‘Of course, I will, Anna,’ Bettina cut her off. ‘Now let’s get busy. I want to spend tomorrow at Max’s bedside.’
Anna gave Klaus a beseeching look, but he was studying his hands, a distraught air on his face.
Sleep wouldn’t come that night. A book in front of her, Anna tried vainly to read. Instead, her eyes focussed randomly on objects in the room which had intermittently been hers for so many years: the graceful little flower lamp with its tinted petals, the cloud blue drapes, the walnut commode, the dainty secretaire with its wealth of tiny drawers.
Max had said Leo was safe. Why was it then that she was still so worried, that Max’s words had done so little to calm her? If only she knew where he was so that she could reach him.
Her eyes fell again on her secretaire. With a start she remembered the letter about Leo’s new school, rushed to look for it. He could be starting there in two day’s time. Yes, she convinced herself, that was precisely what he would do, go there without contacting them, without alerting anyone.
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