by Rose Tremain
He tells Lottie that, despite Emilie’s return, they will find a way to go on with their love affair ‘even at the risk of everybody finding out about it’ because without her, he feels as though he’s slowly dying. He proposes coming to Grünewaldstrasse, early in the morning, after Roger has left for Police Headquarters. He asks her to send him word about which day he should come. He imagines her putting on the silky peignoir she wore the afternoon they first became lovers.
Emilie goes into the spare bedroom in the apartment. There’s no bed in it. It’s stacked high with unopened boxes of books and forgotten knick-knacks from Fribourgstrasse. It has a square window, looking down on a yard and in the yard is a cherry tree in full bloom, a thing of such beauty, it makes Emilie gasp. She sees an elderly resident, Herr Nieder, come out of the building, walking with his stick, and pause by the tree. He reaches out an unsteady hand and touches the white blossom.
Emilie turns back to the room. In her mind, she removes all the boxes, and sweeps the floor. She buys a rug. She puts curtains at the window. Then, with tender care, she places a child’s cot in the room and a soft toy – a rabbit or a bear – in one corner of it, keeping watch.
She knows these imaginings are futile. Erich doesn’t touch her any more. He shows no inclination to want to touch her. But she remembers what a sensual, needy man he is. At the long-ago Schwingfest, she seduced him with one kiss. She reasons that it’s only a matter of time before he will take her back into his bed.
And this is what she wants now. All her anger with Erich has gone. What she longs for is an ordinary, companionable life with the man she married. And sooner or later, a child – a boy of course, to replace her lost Gustav. And she imagines lifting this baby in her arms and taking him to the window and showing him, far below, the white cherry tree in the yard.
Then, Irma’s voice begins to echo in her head: ‘It’s folly to go back to that Jew-lover! He may be handsome, but you can never trust him again. He’ll cheat on you, just as Pierre cheated on me, and you’ll be left alone, like me, with a child you never wanted.’
Two Sundays
Matzlingen, 1941
EMILIE GETS THE job at the cheese co-operative. Though the manager, Herr Studer, looks at her thin body critically, doubting she’s strong enough for all the lifting and stirring that it entails, she reassures him that she’s tougher than she looks. She tells him how she carried great basins of water from a pump to a tin bath in a house near Basel. This puts a secret smile on the manager’s bird-like face. He likes seeing women struggling with heavy work; it makes them both desirable and pitiable. He gives Emilie the job.
She’s paid more money per week than Erich earns at the tram depot. And, in her mind, this gives her a little power over him. It is she who buys the food they eat, sometimes supplemented with small gifts of chocolate or cigars for Erich. She watches her husband closely as he receives these. He always thanks her politely, but there is something about them which seems to make him sad.
On certain mornings, perhaps once a fortnight, he doesn’t come home at half past six and Emilie supposes that he’s making visits to the ‘whore’ with whom he once had breakfast and drank schnapps.
Emilie thinks about this as she begins her work at the co-operative, housed in its draughty shed. She imagines Erich and the woman, warm and easy with each other in some scented room, and she wishes it were not so. But she’s biding her time. She’s taken all the boxes out of the small bedroom and unpacked them, arranging the books and knick-knacks around the apartment. Erich makes almost no comment about this. He just stares at these things, as though he’d never seen them before.
Erich looks at his life and knows that he’s more unhappy than he’s ever been.
The only place where he can make love to Lottie is in the Erdmans’ apartment at Grünewaldstrasse, but she won’t let him visit her too often, terrified that they’ll be discovered. Once, driven mad by his need of her, now so seldom satisfied, he suggests that they run away together.
‘Run where?’ asks Lottie. ‘There’s war everywhere but here.’
‘South America,’ he answers.
Lottie’s bright laugh rings out, the laugh he loves so much. But now it sounds as though it’s mocking him. Already, he’s imagined them – Erich and Lottie, Herr and Frau Perle to all the world – in some sunlit glade, with the wind from the high plains sighing sweetly all around them, and birds he doesn’t recognise in the tall trees. But Lottie laughs at his dreams. She’s Police Chief Roger Erdman’s wife. She reminds him patiently that she will never leave Roger.
He goes mournfully back to Unter der Egg, glad that Emilie’s at work, that he can at least be alone. He lies in a hot bath, where Emilie’s stockings hang on a string above him, and washes the smell of Lottie from his body. He rests his head on the back of the bath and closes his eyes. He asks himself if he can stand to go on with the life he’s living. Though his police revolver was taken from him, he has a gun in his wardrobe – the rifle every Swiss household is obliged to keep, in case the need for self-defence arises – and Erich wonders whether he would ever have the courage to shoot himself. He remembers that it’s surely difficult to commit suicide with a rifle, and yet the thought that he could do it comforts him.
Erich crawls into bed and falls asleep. As always, Lottie is there, at the edge of his dreams.
On Sundays, he drinks.
Emilie cooks her famous roast pork with knödel, and they sit side by side at the kitchen shelf, sharing the meal and drinking red wine.
It is Sunday now and Erich, having eaten well, sips his wine greedily and feels his body and his mind to be free of pain. He knows that this freedom from pain won’t last, but he’s grateful for it, while it does.
‘Wine,’ he tells Emilie, ‘is nature’s consolation: the only one.’
‘There used to be others between us,’ she says.
He ignores this, but when she gets up to clear the plates, he looks at her and notices that she’s wearing a clean summer dress and that she’s set her hair into soft curls.
He gets to his feet. The only way that this can be done, he thinks, is to do it now – right now – with the help of the wine – and to hope that a distant memory of how it once was comes to his aid. He grabs Emilie’s hand and leads her to the bedroom and pushes her down on the bed. He knows that she won’t protest. He’s known for some time that this is what she wants.
She’s naked underneath her dress and this excites him enough to allow him to penetrate her. She tries to kiss his mouth, but he turns his face aside. He breathes heavily. The room spins. He remembers how easy this used to be between them, but now, already, he can feel desire fading. Yet he tells himself that he has a duty here, on this one afternoon, to complete the thing, that if he can make himself do this, then his life with Emilie – his life so starved of Lottie’s love – will become more bearable. He thinks how, in the future, it could be something to taunt Lottie with: ‘I make love to Emilie again now. She’s begun to excite me, like she used to do …’
He looks towards the bedroom door. He conjures Lottie. This is the only way he can get hard again. Lottie stands in the doorway watching him make love to his wife. She’s excited by it. All that is strange and contrary in sex excites Lottie Erdman. So she’s come here to take part. She murmurs Erich’s name and lifts up her skirt and begins to touch herself. And to see her do this has always aroused him more than he has ever admitted to her. He closes his eyes. Lottie whispers to him that this is a beautiful thing, to see him moving inside another woman, that in moments, she’s going to come. So then, for Erich, there is no Emilie beneath him. There is no room, no daylight, no sound. There is only the taste of the wine in his throat and the pulsing of his heart and his beloved Lottie in her shameless delirium. From here, it’s an easy, beautiful ride. When he finishes he cries out and lets his body fall into darkness.
Emilie’s pregnancy is confirmed in the autumn. When she learns about this, she weeps with joy. The doctor tells her
that the baby will be born the following June.
She asks Erich if he’s happy about becoming a father at last. He looks at her as though she’d just uttered a foreign word that he doesn’t understand.
‘Happy? Not particularly,’ he says. ‘I lost the knack of happiness when I lost my job.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘you should have thought about that before you sided with the Jews.’
‘Please don’t talk like that,’ he says. ‘It’s hateful.’
‘I think I have the right,’ she says, ‘considering everything that happened.’
‘You don’t have the right. It’s in the past now.’
‘It’s not in the past. The threat of prosecution is still out there. A summons to court could arrive at any time.’
‘It might, but it hasn’t come yet. And anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘Wrong,’ she says. ‘We can talk to the people at the Israelitische Flüchtlingshilfe. They must speak up for you. Who knows if it wasn’t they who betrayed you?’
‘It wasn’t them.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘It couldn’t have been. Why would they have done that? It was their people I was saving from death.’
‘Who was it, then? Roger Erdman? Someone betrayed you.’
‘Not Roger.’
‘Very likely the IF, in my view. To save their own skins. So if the summons comes – or when it comes – they should behave with decency and send someone to the Justice Ministry in Bern, to plead for you.’
He tells her he’s already been to see the IF and that they can do nothing, but she doesn’t believe him.
The following day, after work, she goes to their cramped offices. She knows she smells of cheese, but she doesn’t care. She climbs a set of narrow stairs, holding onto her pregnant stomach, as if believing the baby needs comfort, to find itself in such a place. She enters a large, threadbare room, stuffed from floor to ceiling with box files and bundles of paper tied with string. An elderly Jewish man sits behind a high desk, his head bent low, as though he were in the habit of hiding from the world.
When Emilie begins on Erich’s story, the man looks confused. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ he says.
‘I’ve told you: my husband. Herr Erich Perle. He was Assistant Police Chief here in Matzlingen in August 1938. It was because he agreed to falsify dates of entry on registration forms that hundreds of Jews were able to stay in Switzerland.’
‘I’ve never heard about that. It was before my time working here.’
‘Well. You’re here now, sir. Among all these files in this room, there will be a record of this.’
‘You expect me to go through a thousand files?’
‘I am expecting you to help me. I am carrying a child. If my husband is sent to prison, I will be destitute.’
‘Prison? Sent to prison?’
‘He was sacked from the police force and had his pension and everything taken away from him. He was told that he could still be prosecuted and incarcerated. So I am here to say that we are expecting the IF to speak out for him, to go to Bern, if necessary, if the summons comes.’
The man rubs his eyes. Then he puts on a pair of spectacles and stares at Emilie. They confront each other, face-to-face. Somewhere, down the far end of the room, Emilie can hear the click-click of typewriters and the sound of a person with a choking cough. The man waits for the cough to subside, then he says, ‘I suppose you have heard what is being done to Jews in Germany and Austria?’
‘Yes. I have heard. Or, at least, I have heard rumours. That is why you must help my husband. He saved your people from a terrible fate, but at the price of his own life.’
‘What d’you mean, “at the price of his own life”?’
‘He has never recovered from the loss of his position. He works nights in the tram depot now. That was all he could get. He wanted to be a teacher, but no one would hire him. We lost our apartment – everything. He walks though his life like a dead man.’
The old man shakes his head, as though to dismiss as unimportant everything Emilie has just said. Wearily, he takes up a pen, pushes his glasses further up his nose, and asks, ‘What was your husband’s name again?’
Emilie saves up to buy the cot and the rug. She buys a tin train.
She looks at the child’s room. She knows it’s still too bare, not welcoming enough for her new little Gustav. She makes lists of the objects she would like to find for it. In March, she calls on Lottie Erdman to ask her to come with her to the bric-à-brac stalls one Sunday morning, to look for these things.
When Lottie opens her apartment door and sees Emilie there, resplendent now, in her sixth month of pregnancy, her face pales and she has to sit down on the nearest chair.
‘Are you all right, Lottie?’ asks Emilie.
‘Yes,’ says Lottie. ‘Sorry. I get dizzy spells sometimes. I don’t know why.’
Heartbeat
Matzlingen, 1942
LOTTIE SENDS A note to the tram depot. She asks Erich to meet her at an out-of-the-way café, where no one will recognise them. There is snow on the ground.
In the café, Erich still feels chilled after his night at the depot, and orders hot chocolate.
Lottie says, ‘I’m not going to have anything comforting. Today is going to be hard, but we just have to bear it.’
She’s dressed in a black coat with a fur collar. Her blonde hair is partly concealed by a black fur hat. He thinks, this is how Anna Karenina looked to Vronsky – before he tired of her, before the spell was broken. He wants to reach under the table and put his hand on her cunt.
She begins to talk, but he’s not really listening; Lottie is just too perfect in the early-morning light, her skin so fine and soft, her blue eyes strangely glittering with tears. He could take her now, right there on the hard bench, not caring about anything in the world except being inside her and hearing her cry out his name.
But now she’s telling him that he has to listen to her. She tells him that the love affair is over. She’s made up her mind. With Emilie pregnant, she’s decided that she wants to have a child, too – Roger’s child. She wants to commit to Roger and to a family. ‘The rest,’ she says, ‘is folly. We’ve always known this. And it has to end.’
Erich stares at her. Her beauty is like a weight on him, suffocating him, pinning him down to the earth.
‘Why did you put on lipstick?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘Why did you paint yourself up, to tell me that you don’t love me any more?’
Lottie takes off her fur hat and shakes her golden tresses loose.
‘I never did love you,’ she says. ‘I never said that. I just liked what we did.’
‘Liked? Is that the right word? You just liked it?’
‘Yes. It was just animal sex, Erich. Animals don’t even have the words to say if they’re “liking it” or not: they just do it. They meet and the moment comes and they have to do it. And we were like them. We didn’t think of anything but satisfying ourselves. Over and over again. Like pigs. We were pigs.’
Erich’s hand trembles as he lights a cigarette. The waiter brings his hot chocolate and a glass of water for Lottie. The smell of the chocolate now sickens him. He can’t look at Lottie any more, it’s too painful. He looks down at the wooden floor, where the butts of cigarettes from last night’s drinkers still lie, and he thinks how shabby the world is and how tired and old and full of discarded things.
‘Listen,’ says Lottie gently, ‘I don’t mean to imply that I’ll ever forget us, Erich. The things we did! When I’m ancient, I’ll probably remember them and wonder if it was true. And it’s not like that with Roger. It’s much more ordinary and quiet. But the thing is, I do love Roger. I’ve never stopped loving him. You’ve always known that. I’ve never lied to you about that. And when I saw Emilie, pregnant, I knew that this was what I wanted, to have children with Roger, lots of children. I don’t want my breasts to be sex objects any
more; I want to suckle my babies.’
Her breasts. Why did she have to mention them? He used to lie on her and suck like a child, loving the way the nipples hardened as she became aroused, even imagining that some beautiful dewy substance came out of these pert nipples, to nourish him and bind him to her – bind her forever, because he knew he would always need her. Lottie Erdman. His only love.
He gets up and stubs out his cigarette. He casts a last look at her in the harsh morning light of the poor café, to etch her there in his mind: her smooth cheeks, her scarlet lips, her pale hand clutching the fur on her coat collar. Then, he turns and walks out into the street, where a light snow is falling.
In the seventh month of her pregnancy, Emilie gives up her job at the cheese co-operative. The manager, Herr Studer, is courteous and says he will take her back whenever she feels ready to work again. She is given a large slice of Emmental in what Herr Studer calls a ‘presentation box’. As she leaves, he kisses her cheek.
Emilie begins to count the days remaining before the birth: sixty days, forty days, thirty days …
She sees the doctor as regularly as she can and the doctor lets her put his stethoscope in her ears, to hear the baby’s heartbeat. And this moves Emilie to say, ‘I know it’s a boy. We’re going to call him Gustav. Like the one I lost.’
‘Ah. You lost one?’
‘Yes. At five and a half months, but this one is strong, isn’t he? He’s going to be all right?’
‘As far as anyone can tell.’
‘I think the heartbeat sounds strong. He won’t be small and thin, like me, but tall and well made like my husband. I know he will. Or perhaps I just want it? Do you think that wanting things can make them happen?’
The doctor takes the stethoscope away. ‘If I really believed that,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t bother being a doctor.’