The street was a forest of red, black and white. ‘Their colours are very harsh,’ Sylvie said, as though she were considering asking the National Socialists to decorate her living room.
At the Führer’s approach the crowd’s excitement had grown to a rabid frenzy of Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler. ‘Am I the only one to be unmoved?’ Sylvie said. ‘What is it, do you suppose – mass hysteria of some kind?’
‘I know,’ Ursula said, ‘it’s like the Emperor’s new clothes. We’re the only ones who can see the naked man.’
‘He’s a clown,’ Sylvie said dismissively.
‘Shush,’ Ursula said. The English word was the same as the German and she didn’t want to attract the hostility of the people around them. ‘You should put your arm up,’ she said.
‘Me?’ the outraged flower of British womanhood replied.
‘Yes, you.’
Reluctantly, Sylvie raised her arm. Ursula thought that until the day she died she would remember the sight of her mother giving the Nazi salute. Of course, Ursula said to herself afterwards, this was in ’34, back when one’s conscience hadn’t been shrunk and muddled by fear, when she had been blind to what was truly afoot. Blinded by love perhaps, or just dumb stupidity. (Pamela had seen, unblinkered by anything.)
Sylvie had made the journey to Germany so that she could inspect Ursula’s unexpected husband. Ursula wondered what she had planned to do if she hadn’t found Jürgen suitable – drug and kidnap her and haul her on to the Schnellzug? They were still in Munich then, Jürgen hadn’t started working for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, they hadn’t moved to the Savignyplatz or become parents to Frieda, although Ursula was cumbersome with pregnancy.
‘Fancy you becoming a mother,’ Sylvie said, as if it were something she had never expected. ‘To a German,’ she added thoughtfully.
‘To a baby,’ Ursula said.
‘It’s nice to get away,’ Sylvie said. From what, Ursula wondered?
Klara met them for lunch one day and afterwards said, ‘Your mother is rather chic.’ Ursula had never thought of Sylvie as stylish but she supposed that compared with Klara’s mother, Frau Brenner, as soft and doughy as a loaf of Kartoffelbrot, Sylvie was quite a fashion plate.
On the way back from lunch, Sylvie said she wanted to visit Oberpollingers and buy a present for Hugh. When they reached the department store they found the windows daubed with anti-Jewish slogans and Sylvie said, ‘Gracious, what a mess.’ The shop was open for business but a pair of grinning louts in SA uniform were loitering in front of the doors, putting people off from entering. Not Sylvie, who had marched past the Brownshirts while Ursula reluctantly trailed in her wake into the store and up the thickly carpeted staircase. In the face of the uniforms, Ursula had shrugged a cartoon helplessness and murmured rather shamefacedly, ‘She’s English.’ She thought that Sylvie didn’t understand what it was like living in Germany but in retrospect she thought that perhaps Sylvie had understood very well.
‘Ah, here’s lunch,’ Eva said, putting down the camera and taking Frieda’s hand. She led her to the table and then propped her up on an extra cushion before heaping her plate with food. Chicken, roast potatoes and a salad, all from the Gutshof. How well they ate here. Milchreis for Frieda’s pudding, the milk fresh that morning from the cows of the Gutshof. (A less childish Käsekuchen for Ursula, a cigarette for Eva.) Ursula remembered Mrs Glover’s rice pudding, a creamy, sticky yellow beneath its crisp brown skin. She could smell the nutmeg even though she knew there was none in Frieda’s dish. She couldn’t remember the German for nutmeg and thought it was too difficult to explain to Eva. The food was the only thing that she was going to miss about the Berghof so she might as well enjoy it while she could, she thought, and helped herself to more Käsekuchen.
Lunch was served to them by a small contingent of the army of staff who serviced the Berghof. The Berg was a curious combination of Alpine holiday chalet and military training camp. A small town really with a school, a post office, a theatre, a large SS barracks, a rifle range, a bowling alley, a Wehrmacht hospital and much more, everything but a church really. There were also plenty of young, handsome Wehrmacht officers who would have made better suitors for Eva.
After lunch they walked up to the Teehaus on the Mooslahner Kopf, Eva’s yappy, nippy dogs running along beside them. (If only one of them would fall off the parapet or from the outlook.) Ursula had the beginnings of a headache and sank gratefully into one of the armchairs with green-flowered linen upholstery that she found particularly offensive to the eye. Tea – and cake, naturally – were brought to them from the kitchen. Ursula swallowed a couple of codeine with her tea and said, ‘I think Frieda’s well enough to go home now.’
Ursula went to bed as early as she could, slipping in between the cool white sheets of the guest-room bed she shared with Frieda. Too tired to sleep, she found herself still awake at two in the morning so she put on the bedside light – Frieda slept the deep sleep of children, only illness could wake her – and she got out pen and paper and wrote to Pamela instead.
Of course, none of these letters to Pamela was ever posted. She couldn’t be completely sure that they wouldn’t be read by someone. You just didn’t know, that was the awful thing (how much more awful for others). Now she wished they weren’t in the dog-days of heat when the Kachelofen in the guest room was cold and unlit, as it would have been safer to burn the correspondence. Safer never to have written at all. One could no longer express one’s true thoughts. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning. What was that from? Measure for Measure? But perhaps truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful lot of reckoning when the time came.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner. She had planned to go back in May but then Frieda had become sick. She’d had it all planned, their suitcases were packed, stored beneath the bed, where they were usually kept empty so Jürgen had no reason to look inside them. She had the train tickets, the onward boat-train tickets, had told no one, not even Klara. She hadn’t wanted to move their passports – Frieda’s luckily still valid from their trip to England in ’35 – from the big porcupine-quill box where all their documents were kept. She had checked they were there almost every day but then the day before they were to go she looked in the box and there was no sign of them. She thought she was mistaken, rifled through birth and death and marriage certificates, through insurance and guarantees, Jürgen’s will (he was a lawyer, after all), all kinds of paperwork except for what mattered. In mounting panic she emptied the lot on to the carpet and went through everything one by one, again and again. No passports, only Jürgen’s. In desperation she went through every drawer in the house, searched inside every shoebox and cupboard, beneath sofa cushions and mattresses. Nothing.
They ate supper as normal. She could barely swallow. ‘Are you feeling ill?’ Jürgen asked, solicitously.
‘No,’ she said. Her voice sounded squeaky. What could she say? He knew, of course, he knew.
‘I thought we might take a holiday,’ he said. ‘On Sylt.’
‘Sylt?’
‘Sylt. We won’t need a passport for there,’ he said. Did he smile? Did he? And then Frieda was ill and nothing else mattered.
‘Er kommt!’ Eva said happily the next morning at breakfast. The Führer was coming.
‘When? Now?’
‘No, this afternoon.’
‘What a shame, we’ll be gone by then,’ Ursula said. Thank God, she thought. ‘Do thank him, won’t you?’
They were taken home in one of the fleet of black Mercedes from the Platterhof garage, driven by the same chauffeur who had brought them to the Berghof.
The next day Germany invaded Poland.
April 1945
THEY HAD LIVED for months in the cellar, like rats. When the British were bombing by day and the Americans by night there was nothing else for it. The cellar beneath the apartment block in the Savignyplatz was dank and disgusting, a small paraffin lamp for light an
d one bucket for a lavatory, yet the cellar was better than one of the bunkers in town. She had been caught with Frieda near the zoo in a daylight raid and had taken shelter in the Zoo Station flak tower – thousands of people crammed in, the air supply gauged by a candle (as if they were canaries). If the candle goes out, someone told her, everyone has to leave, out into the open even if a raid is in progress. Near to where they were crushed against a wall, a man and a woman were embracing (a polite term for what they were doing) and as they were leaving they had to step over an old man who had died during the raid. The worst thing, even worse than this, was that as well as being a shelter the enormous concrete citadel was a gigantic anti-aircraft battery, several huge guns pounding away on the roof the whole time so that the shelter shook with every recoil. It was the closest to hell that Ursula ever hoped to come.
An enormous explosion had shaken the structure, a bomb dropped close to the zoo. She felt the pressure wave sucking and pushing her body and was terrified that Frieda’s lungs might burst. It passed. Several people vomited, although unfortunately there was nowhere to vomit except on one’s feet, or perhaps worse, on other people’s feet. Ursula vowed never to go into a flak tower again. She would rather, she thought, die out in the street, quickly, with Frieda. That’s what she thought about a lot of the time now. A swift, clean death, Frieda wrapped in her arms.
Perhaps it was Teddy up there, dropping bombs on them. She hoped it was, it would mean he was alive. There had been a knock on the door one day – when they still had a door, before the British started their relentless bombing in November ’43. When Ursula opened the door she found a thin youth standing there, fifteen or sixteen years old maybe. He had a desperate air and Ursula wondered if he was looking for somewhere to hide but he pushed an envelope into her hand and ran off before she could even say a word to him.
The envelope was creased and filthy. Her name and address were written on it and she burst into tears at the sight of Pamela’s handwriting. Thin papery blue sheets, dated several weeks ago, detailing all the comings and goings of her family – Jimmy in the army, Sylvie fighting the good fight on the home front (‘a new weapon – chickens!’). Pamela was well and living at Fox Corner, she said, four boys now. Teddy in the RAF, a squadron leader with a DFC. A lovely long letter and at the end a page that was almost like a postscript, ‘I have saved the sad news to last.’ Hugh was dead. ‘In the autumn of 1940, peacefully, a heart attack.’ Ursula wished she hadn’t received the letter, wished she could think of Hugh still alive, of Teddy and Jimmy in non-combatant roles, living out the war in a coal mine or civil defence.
‘I think of you constantly,’ Pamela said. No recriminations, no ‘I told you so’, no ‘Why didn’t you come home when you could have done?’ She had tried, too late, of course. The day after Germany declared war on Poland she had gone through town, dutifully doing the things that she thought you were supposed to do when war was imminent. She stocked up on batteries and torches and candles, she bought canned goods and blackout material, she shopped for clothes for Frieda in Wertheim’s department store – one and two sizes bigger in case the war went on for a long time. She bought nothing for herself, passing by all those warm coats and boots, stockings and decent frocks, something she bitterly regretted now.
She heard Chamberlain on the BBC, those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela but the lines were all engaged. Then towards evening (Jürgen had been at the ministry all day) she suddenly came back to life, Snow White awake. She must leave, she must go back to England, passport or no. She packed a hasty suitcase and harried Frieda on to a tram to the station. If she could just get on a train somehow everything would be all right. No trains, an official at the station told her. The borders were closed. ‘We’re at war, didn’t you know?’ he said.
She ran to the British Embassy in Wilhelmstrasse, dragging poor Frieda by the hand. They were German citizens but she would throw herself on the mercy of the embassy staff, surely they would be able to do something, she was still an Englishwoman after all. It was growing dark by then and the gates were padlocked and there were no lights on in the building. ‘They’ve gone,’ a passer-by told her, ‘you’ve missed them.’
‘Gone?’
‘Back to Britain.’
She had to clap a hand over her mouth to stop the wail that rose up from deep inside her. How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she seen what was coming? A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past. Something else that Elizabeth I had said.
She wept on and off for two days after receiving Pamela’s letter. Jürgen was sympathetic, came home with some real coffee for her and she didn’t ask where he had got it. A good cup of coffee (miraculous as that was) was hardly going to assuage her grief for her father, for Frieda, for herself. For everybody. Jürgen died in an American raid in ’44. Ursula was ashamed at how relieved she felt when she was given the news, especially as Frieda was so upset. She loved her father and he loved her, which was a nugget of grace to be salvaged from the whole sorry business of their marriage.
Frieda was ill now. She had the same gaunt features and sickly pallor of most people you saw on the streets these days but her lungs were full of phlegm and she had terrible bouts of coughing that seemed as though they would never end. When Ursula listened to her chest it was like listening to a galleon at sea, heaving and creaking through the waves. If only she could sit her down by a big warm fire, give her hot cocoa to drink, a beef stew, dumplings, carrots. Were they still eating well on the Berg, she wondered? Was anyone still on the Berg?
Above their heads, the apartment block was still standing although most of the front wall had been taken away by a bomb. They still went up there to forage for anything useful. It had been saved from looting by the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting up the staircase which was filled with rubble. She and Frieda tied pieces of cushion to their knees with rags and wore thick leather gloves that had belonged to Jürgen and in this way clambered over the stones and bricks like inept monkeys.
The one thing there was nothing of in the apartment was the only thing they were interested in – food. Yesterday they had queued for three hours for a loaf of bread. When they ate it, it seemed to contain no actual flour, although it was hard to say what it did contain – cement dust and plaster? That was what it tasted of anyway. Ursula remembered Rogerson’s the baker’s in the village at home, how the smell of the baking bread would waft through the street and how the bakery’s window was full of lovely soft white loaves burnished with a sticky bronze glaze. Or the kitchen at Fox Corner on Mrs Glover’s baking days – the big brown ‘health’ loaves that Sylvie insisted on, but also the sponges and tarts and buns. She imagined eating a slice of the warm brown bread, thickly buttered, with the jam made from the raspberries and redcurrants at Fox Corner. (She tormented herself with memories of food the whole time.) There was to be no more milk, someone told her in the bread queue.
This morning, Fräulein Farber and her sister Frau Meyer who had lived together in the attic but who now rarely left the cellar gave her two potatoes and a piece of cooked sausage for Frieda, Aus Anstand, they said, out of decency. Herr Richter, also a cellar resident, told Ursula that the sisters had decided to stop eating. (An easy thing to do when there was no food, Ursula thought.) They have had enough, he said. They cannot face what will happen when the Russians get here.
They had heard a rumour that in the east people were reduced to eating grass. Lucky them, Ursula thought, there was no grass in Berlin, just the black skeletal remains of a proud and beautiful city. Was London like this too? It seemed unlikely, yet possible. Speer had his noble ruins, a thousand years early.
The inedible bread yesterday, two half-raw potatoes the day before that was all Ursula had in her own stomach. Everything else – for the little it was worth – she’d given to Frieda. But what good would it do Frieda if Ursula were dead? She couldn’t leave her alone in this terr
ible world.
After the British raid on the zoo they had gone to see if there were any animals they could eat but plenty of people had got there before them. (Could that happen at home? Londoners scavenging in Regent’s Park zoo? Why not?)
They still saw the occasional bird that was clearly not native to Berlin, surviving against the odds, and on one occasion, a cowed, mangy creature that they had taken for a dog before they realized it was a wolf. Frieda was all for trying to take it back to the cellar with them and making a pet of it. Ursula couldn’t even imagine what their elderly neighbour Frau Jaeger’s reaction would have been to that.
Their own apartment was like a dolls’ house, open to the world, all the intimate details of their domestic life on view – beds and sofas, the pictures on the walls, even an ornament or two that had miraculously survived the blast. They had raided anything truly useful but there were still some clothes and a few books and only yesterday she had found a cache of candles beneath a pile of broken crockery. Ursula was hoping to trade them in for medicine for Frieda. There was still a lavatory, in the bathroom, and occasionally, who knew how, there was water. One of them would stand and hold up an old sheet to protect the other’s modesty. Did their modesty matter that much any more?
Ursula had made the decision to move back in. It was cold in the apartment but the air wasn’t fetid and she judged that on balance that would be better for Frieda. They still had blankets and quilts they could wrap themselves in and they shared a mattress on the floor, behind a barricade formed by the dining table and chairs. Ursula’s thoughts strayed constantly to the meals they had eaten at that table, her dreams full of meat, pork and beef, slabs of it grilled and roasted and fried.
Life After Life Page 30