by Rose Tremain
Snow falls in the new year, 1940, and Switzerland grows silent, as though listening, in terror, for the sound of advancing armies. The pump in the yard has to be bound with sacking, to stop it freezing. Round the sacking, Irma ties an ancient fox tippet, ragged and scarred. Now, when Emilie looks out at the pump, she imagines a wild animal in the yard, rearing up in terror at finding itself there.
More and more, Emilie dreams of Charlie Chaplin and the palm-lined boulevards of Hollywood, far away, where the war could never, ever reach. She dances with Charlie beside a floodlit swimming pool. He says to her, ‘Ah, Emilie, you are just the right height for me. Let’s fly over the rainbow together.’
But how long can it be endured, this life with Irma? Emilie tries not to think about this. For what’s the point in thinking about an end to your present sorrows, when you’re a prisoner of events, a prisoner of time?
Sometimes, far down the valley, Emilie can hear the voices of children, building snowmen, playing on luges, and she thinks what a joyous sound this is, and how, by this year, 1940, her little Gustav would have been talking and laughing and how she would have had his own small sleigh made for him and how she might have borrowed a docile pony, to pull the sleigh along.
Once again, Emilie and Irma are heading for the town. Irma is wearing her burgundy coat and hat. Emilie suggests going to a different café – just to see if Irma is prepared to pay for their tea, but Irma says crossly, ‘Certainly not. That is the only cake God will permit me to eat.’
So they take their usual table by the window. Irma and Emilie eat the chocolate cake and drink the milky tea. Irma cuts her wedge of cake into slices larger than usual and crams these into her mouth. Her thin cheeks bulge out. And Emilie recognises how, in some sad way, her mother lives for this, for these five or ten minutes of filling herself with chocolate. A moment of compassion for Irma slides into her heart. She wants to touch her shoulder or stroke her hand, but she holds back from these gestures.
When the cake is finished and Irma asks for the bill, what arrives is a stack of bills, perhaps thirty, or more, signed by Irma, but never paid. They are brought to the table by the café owner, Frau Mollis, who pulls out a chair and sits down.
‘I’m sorry, Frau Albrecht,’ Frau Mollis says, ‘I think we have been very patient with these bills. But you see how many there are now. I am going to ask you to settle them today. That way, you will be free to enjoy your tea and chocolate cake again in the future. I will accept a cheque, if you do not have the ready money.’
‘Oh,’ says Irma. ‘Well, of course I don’t have the ready money. How much is owing?’
‘Ninety-two francs and ten centimes.’
‘So you’re pernickety about centimes?’
‘I’m just telling you what you owe.’
‘I think it’s far too much. All that for cake! Ridiculous.’
‘You can examine the bills if you want to. My husband and I have added them up very carefully. That is the sum owing.’
Irma stares at Frau Mollis. She shakes her head, as though a mortal insult has just been aimed at her. Then, she reaches up and takes the long hatpin out of her hat and holds it out to Frau Mollis. On the end of the hatpin is a large pearl.
‘Here you are, then,’ says Irma. ‘If you insist, I’ll give you this in payment. It belonged to my grandmother. It was bought for her in Paris at the turn of the century. It’s worth far more than ninety-two francs and ten centimes.’
Frau Mollis takes the pin. She looks confused. She doesn’t examine it closely, but just holds it in her hand.
‘I can’t accept this,’ she says. ‘As I’ve said, I will take a cheque …’
‘Well,’ says Irma, ‘I can give you a cheque. But there is no money in my account. Which would you like – a worthless cheque or a valuable pearl?’
Frau Mollis gets up, leaving the pile of bills on the table. She disappears into the kitchen at the back of the café.
Irma sniffs and shakes her head again. ‘Very stupid,’ she says. ‘These are very stupid people.’
Emilie is silent. She remembers the pearl hatpin. As a teenager, she’d found it one day in a drawer in her mother’s room, and – among the detritus of old combs, spilt face powder, cigarette ash, tweezers, nail files, pills and clumps of cotton wool – she had thought it an object of wonder. The pearl was so large. Surely no oyster could have produced such a thing? And how had it been attached to the pin?
Thirteen-year-old Emilie had taken one of the steel nail files and with the pointy tip had begun, very carefully, to scratch away at the pearl. At its base, where the pin went in, a tiny flake of pearly substance had fallen off. Underneath this, the pearl had been grey. And Emilie had thought that real pearls were nothing but themselves all the way through and that this greyness was something else, which was false.
She’d wanted to tell her mother, in case she didn’t know, that the pearl wasn’t real, but this would have involved admitting that she’d been prying into her personal possessions, that she’d seen all the secret mess of powder, of tangled grey hair in the combs. Yet, ever since, when Irma wears the pearl hatpin in her burgundy hat, Emilie remembers the little speck of pearlised coating that fell off and that still lies, perhaps, in Irma’s drawer, invisible among the cigarette ash.
Frau Mollis returns to the table with her husband. It is he who is now holding the hatpin. He clears his throat and says, ‘Frau Albrecht, I’m sorry, but we cannot accept this pin. Next time you come – and you know you are always welcome in our tea room – please bring the requisite cash sum to settle your bills.’
Other people in the café have turned to stare. Irma hesitates for a moment, ready to argue with Herr Mollis, but then changes her mind and snatches the hatpin out of his hand and stabs it angrily back into her burgundy hat.
Emilie knows they will never go back to the tea room, and they never do.
She lies in her narrow bed. She thinks how, throughout her life, Irma – for all her piety – has behaved in ways which are shameful. And she wonders how this began, this heedless treatment of other people.
In another drawer, containing winter scarves and darned gloves, Emilie once found a photograph – faded and bent – of a man Irma said was ‘responsible’ for Emilie’s birth. She didn’t refer to him as ‘your father’, but only as the ‘man responsible’. His name was Pierre. He had come to Basel from Geneva, where he’d worked in a hotel. He wanted to ‘better himself’, Irma said, but could only get café work in Basel, and when he found out that Irma was pregnant with his child, he disappeared from one day to the next. Perhaps he went to Paris, where he’d dreamed of owning a nightclub?
Emilie has looked several times at the photograph of Pierre – a sleek and handsome man on the outside, but a coward and a cheat in his dealings with women, leaving Irma Albrecht with a lifelong fury that never abated.
In the darkness of the winter night, Emilie finds herself comparing her husband to her absent father. She begins to see something important, which she had never before considered: Pierre was like the false pearl on the hatpin, with a beautiful sheen to his body, but a soul of dross. Erich, on the other hand, is himself through and through. He did what his heart told him to do and was prepared to take the consequences. He is a man who can’t lie to himself, can’t follow a path he believes to be wrong. And she herself now glimpses a narrow road that winds back to him – to his forgiveness and his love.
Folly
Matzlingen, 1941
ERICH HAS ASPIRATIONS to be a teacher. He believes that all his disciplined and careful work in the police has fitted him for this new métier. He would like to teach history – to get to the truth of things. He begins to borrow history books from the library. Surrounded on every side by the war, he knows that Switzerland must cling fast to its neutrality and develop in its children an understanding of why their country is the way it is.
He applies to four schools in Matzlingen, but none of them want to risk hiring a ‘disgraced’ police of
ficer, with a trial pending. He has wilfully broken the law. He is rudely reminded that ‘criminals and children must never be allowed to mix’. He wants to protest, but he knows that minds have been made up. Fear of a German invasion is a daily agony for the country, seldom talked about, yet always felt. Nobody is going to listen to him.
He’s taken on at the tram depot. He works a night shift with a much younger man called Erlen. Their job is to supervise the cleaning and maintenance of the trams between one and six in the morning and oversee their first despatch into the town. Erich is paid a scant wage for all these long, night hours, but he has to live somehow. He has to eat. He has to pay the rent on the apartment on Unter der Egg. And there is one bonus attaching to working nights: his days are free for his visits from Lottie Erdman.
Lottie Erdman haunts his waking and sleeping hours. It’s as though he’s been searching for Lottie all his life and now he’s found her – his perfect lover. The sight, smell, touch and taste of Lottie are like a drug to him. Always, he wants more. When she leaves him, and he staggers about the apartment on legs weak from sexual exertion and lack of sleep, he counts the hours, or days, till he’s going to see her again. All night, in the cold depot, he sighs over the fact that she’s not his wife – and never can be. She’s the wife of his friend. And when he thinks about Roger making love to her, he feels a pain in his heart and groin so acute it sometimes makes him wonder whether he’s on the brink of some catastrophic collapse.
Lottie understands how obsessed he is. Sometimes, she can treat him like some wilful Cleopatra, making him wait, making him beg. And the more she does this, the more he wants her. And he wants her in every way, not caring if he hurts her, enthralled, in fact, by the idea that he can hurt her in the very midst of pleasure. He knows he’s half mad in his yearning, with all restraint abandoned. It’s the kind of folly that could kill a man.
Of Emilie, he hardly thinks. He imagines her sometimes in her mother’s house, trudging between the empty hillside and the broken-down door. He marvels that he fell in love with such a person. How did it ever come about? Only because of a beautiful summer day at the Schwingfest. Because of a kiss. Because she was a virgin. Because she’d set her heart on him. But thinking of her now, he can barely remember any days or nights when he was happy with her.
After one afternoon with Lottie, an afternoon so potent he knows he will never forget it, he sits down and writes a letter to Emilie. He suggests that ‘in the light of all that has happened’ that they apply to get divorced. And when this is written, he feels consoled, as though a divorce from Emilie would enable him to marry Lottie, have children with Lottie, stay with her to the end of his life.
But before Erich has posted his letter, Emilie returns.
She returns in the middle of an afternoon. Erich is sleeping. Lottie had been with him since nine o’clock, but had left at mid-day. The bed is still scented with her perfume, the sheets still damp and tangled from their lovemaking.
Erich hears the knock at the apartment door, but turns over and tries to sleep again. He hears footsteps retreat. Then he hears the door opening and the voice of Ludwig Krams, the teenage son of the concierge, calling out, ‘Herr Perle, I saw you come in. You must be there. I have a lady here who says she’s your wife.’
Erich sits up. He’s naked in the bed. He tugs on a pair of trousers and a vest and goes into the small living room, where he sees Emilie standing near the door. Ludwig Krams is smiling his idiot smile. ‘Your wife,’ he says, putting his hand in front of his mouth, to suppress laughter. ‘You didn’t tell my mother you had a wife, Herr Perle!’
‘Please leave us, Ludwig,’ says Erich.
Ludwig says, ‘I almost laughed. I know that’s impolite. I’ll go now.’
He turns and walks out of the apartment. Emilie hasn’t moved. She is standing with clenched fists, staring at Erich.
He dismays her. His hair is long and wild, his chin unshaven, his lips raw, his neck scarred with red bruises – the kind of bruise which people who know about sex call something else, but Emilie can’t remember what the word is. She’s come back to say that she’s sorry, that she’s reconciled to the loss of their old life, that she wants forgiveness for the way she abandoned him so hastily. She wants to say that in recent times she’s been thinking very deeply about the man she knows him to be, true to himself, honest, compassionate and kind. But, facing him as he is, stinking like a fox, she can say none of these things. All she can stammer out is, ‘I suppose there’s a woman with you. Is there?’
‘No,’ says Erich. ‘There’s nobody here. Come into the kitchen. I’ll make tea. And we can talk.’
She sets down her suitcase and follows Erich to the kitchen. She notes the dirty dishes piled in the sink, the grime on the cooker. She notes that there is no kitchen table, but only a hinged shelf, on which there are the remains of breakfast, set out for two people, and a half-drunk bottle of schnapps. And at the sight of this, she thinks, I am too late. I was away for too long. He has replaced me.
She stands silent by the shelf, while Erich clears away the breakfast. Tired from her journey, in shock to find herself in this unfamiliar apartment, inhabited by two people, she begins to weep.
Erich ignores this, while he sets a kettle on the stove to boil. Then he takes the cork out of the schnapps bottle and passes it to her. ‘Have a sip of this,’ he says. ‘It will steady you.’
She drinks the fiery schnapps, searches for a handkerchief, and stammers out, ‘You’ve made another life, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ says Erich, reaching up for two teacups.
‘I mustn’t blame you. You probably thought I wasn’t coming back … You had no reason to believe –’
‘Listen to me,’ says Erich. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth, so that we get it out of the way. I pay a whore from time to time. I work nights at the tram depot, so when she comes, she comes here early in the morning, and afterwards we have breakfast – because I treat her in a civilised way. Then, she leaves. All right? I pay a whore. Once a week perhaps. It’s just an arrangement. We fuck, we have breakfast and she leaves. But now that you’re back –’
‘Do you want me back, Erich?’ Emilie sobs. ‘I know I did everything wrong, and I wouldn’t blame you … But I still love you. I had to come and tell you this, at least. I love you very much.’
The word ‘love’ snags at Erich’s heart. It’s the word he uses so often to Lottie, all the while knowing that he will never be allowed to express that love as he wants to express it, as her husband, as the only man in her world. Hearing it from Emilie, he feels that she has somehow stolen it, and this chokes him with sadness.
He spoons tea leaves into a yellow, chipped teapot, biting his lip. He has barely looked at Emilie, but now he stares at her. She is his wife. Lottie Erdman, his voluptuous angel, the woman he makes love to three or four times a week, is not his wife. His wife is Emilie, who stands drinking schnapps and weeping and talking about love. This is she, the woman standing in front of him in a dress too large for her, with a body so thin, so sorrowful and starved, it seems barely alive.
Erich wants to cry out. He stuffs a fist into his mouth.
Somebody save me from this!
Somebody save me!
While she finishes her tea, he puts clean sheets on the bed. She doesn’t see him holding to his face the semen-stained sheets that smell of Lottie’s body and make him want to howl like a wolf.
He hears her washing up his dishes in the kitchen. He remembers how clean she kept the apartment at Fribourgstrasse 61, how she scented it with flowers. Then, he remembers her ripping apart a cushion and covering herself with feathers and tearing at her ugly face …
He goes into the kitchen and says to her, ‘I really don’t know how we’re going to live together, Emilie. I’d been imagining that we would never try to be together again.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I thought, after I left, that I couldn’t live with you any more. But I want to try, Erich. I owe you t
his. I know the old, lovely life we had is gone, but we can try to make something together, can’t we? Can’t we?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘I was so unhappy in my mother’s house. And I began thinking of you all the time. I thought about our time in Davos. Do you remember? The tea dancing. Our view of the mountains. Don’t you remember?’
The afternoon sun is now coming in through the kitchen window and falling on Emilie’s hair, making it look shiny and golden, scant though it is. She reminds Erich of a rodent – a rat or a squirrel – who, in certain configurations of nature’s light, might suddenly arouse your compassion.
‘I remember,’ he says.
That he works nights means they never have to share a bed. Emilie gets up at half past six, when he returns from the tram depot. They drink tea together and then he gets into the bed and falls asleep. She moves about the apartment, tidying and cleaning. From the flower seller on Unter der Egg, she buys scented wild narcissi and bunches of spring violets.
She walks around the town, making enquiries about work. Erich has told her that he’s in debt. She has promised him she will find work as soon as she can and she has hopes that she will be taken on at the newly opened cheese co-operative, making Emmental. ‘From now on,’ she has said to her husband, ‘we will share all our burdens.’
But there is one burden he will never share with her.
On the night of Emilie’s return, in the cold light of the tram depot, Erich Perle composes the only erotic love letter he has ever written in his life.
He puts it in an envelope and gets Erlen to write the address in his uneducated hand, so that Roger won’t recognise Erich’s writing. Erich is now ashamed of the envelope, but not embarrassed by the letter, which begins Lottie my darling, my most precious of all beings, and is signed from your grieving Werther, your steadfast Dante, your persecuted Abelard. He knows he sounds like a schoolboy, but he doesn’t care.