The Pearl Thief

by Fiona McIntosh

  He sat back in feigned surprise. ‘Katerina.’

  She smiled. ‘I haven’t heard my name spoken aloud and in the Czech way, with the trilled “r” and soft “j” sound in so long,’ she said, explaining why her eyes must appear misty. ‘It feels powerful to speak it … with no shame, no fear.’

  ‘It’s such a beautiful name and sits on you well. Kassowicz. I know of your father’s firm. I’m sure our family had glass made by his factory. Jablonec, right?’

  She nodded. ‘Because of the hard sand of the region it was perfect to have the factory based there in northern Bohemia. My mother wouldn’t move there, though. Prague was her home. As I say, we wanted for little as a family. As a result, it was a charmed life for me. I learned languages, music – both piano and violin – I learned to cook at my mother’s side and attended concerts with my family at the Municipal Hall, a glorious Art Nouveau building.’ Katerina gave an expression of soft regret. ‘My mother loved music, encouraged me to learn to read it, play it … I remember my life as wonderful until the start of my teens. My father taught me from my earliest childhood everything he could about art and the antiques he enjoyed and collected. I grew up sharing his interest. And then, when Hitler arrived in Prague and sent down his edict from the castle that Czechoslovakia was now a protectorate of Germany, together we began a new sort of collection.’

  Daniel gestured to the light blanket slung over the arm of the sofa. She gave a brief smile of thanks, wondering how he knew that despite the fire and the sunlight, she was feeling chilled. It was as though her temperature was dropping as she re-entered that frozen day in mid-March 1939. She wasn’t aware of kicking off her shoes, wasn’t conscious of tucking long legs back onto the sofa and beneath the blanket; she didn’t register that she looked away from Daniel and into the fire because she was back in Prague now and it was finally time to relive what she had avoided for so long.

  6

  PRAGUE

  Baron Konstantin von Neurath arrived by train into celebrations that lasted all day. He was the Reichsprotektor and my father deduced that the German strategy was to take everything it wanted from Czechoslovakia without provoking out-and-out rebellion. I was old enough to understand talk of politics, although if I’m honest I was more interested in whether Alexandr Clementis would be allowed to meet me unaccompanied for a hot chocolate at the weekend. My parents were still to give me an answer. I listened to the men talk. I always paid attention to my father because growing up around him I’d decided that he rarely wasted words. If there was nothing to say, he did not fill a silence, but when he spoke there was a point, even if he was just being playful.

  Even so, there was nothing amusing about the Czech late winter of 1939, or so I gathered from the conversation he was having with one of his oldest friends in our sitting room, as I served the small cakes I’d baked with my mother that morning. We’d filled the surface I had dented with a well-aimed thumb with a sweetened paste of poppy seeds. Her recipe was legend in our circles.

  ‘No, Rudolf,’ my father warned, taking one of the proffered cakes. ‘Thank you, dear. Ah, still warm, perfect,’ he said, smiling his appreciation at me before returning his attention to his guest. ‘They’ve sent in a diplomat: silver-haired and silver-tongued so they can steal our freedom while making us believe that we retain a sense of power in governing our nation.’

  ‘You don’t trust the delegation from Bavaria that’s out there feeding the city’s starving?’ Rudolf asked, surprised.

  I was replacing the cake plate on the table but I was watching my father as he bit into the small koláče, nodding his appreciation as its sweetness hit. ‘I am not fooled, Rudolf. Who do you see starving around our city? Do you see children begging on the streets?’

  Rudolf shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘Exactly. There are refugees from Sudeten who could use a feed but that’s it. We have no proliferation of beggars and certainly no Jewish homeless. This is all propaganda. I’m also hearing that all our political parties will be dissolved.’

  ‘When?’ came the reply, full of disbelief and challenge.

  My father sighed. ‘Any moment, I suspect.’

  ‘And us Jews?’

  He glanced my way then. ‘Does your mother need you in the kitchen, Katerina?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, Papa.’ The look I gave him urged him to let me remain.

  ‘I think I will have that second cup of coffee, please. Tell your dear mother to put the pot on again.’

  As I closed the door, I heard my father’s low response. ‘I suggest you all follow my lead and make a meeting soon with your solicitors to update your wills; get your affairs in order and then instruct them to hide those wills or send a copy to a neutral party, well away from Czechoslovakia.’

  Katerina suddenly looked up from the soup bowl still cradled in her lap. ‘That’s the last normal day I remember in our household, in which we hosted a guest with the good china. It’s also the day I felt the first clamp of genuine fear. Until then everything seemed to be either exciting, dare I say, or just plain inconvenient. To me it was politics and the government would sort things out. I was still too young, my mind filled with an awakening to boys. But I knew my father too well and he was frightened, that much I could sense, and so I did leave the room that day, realising it was an escape and not banishment. I decided I didn’t want to know about inevitable war, the overrun of Poland or Neville Chamberlain’s miscalculation that Hitler would see reason. I didn’t want our family under threat.’

  Daniel watched her shake her head and a dark wave of hair fell across her cat’s eye. To him it was one of the most erotic moments he had experienced in the company of a woman. All he had to do was cross the floor and offer an arm of comfort. Even if she denied him, she’d know he cared enough to risk rejection. But it was as though he were glued to his seat.

  ‘It was bad enough that we were all still mourning the loss of Petr.’

  He cleared his throat of the charge of lust that had made its way there.

  She flicked at her hair and pointed briefly in the direction of her eye. ‘The one who shared this mark with me,’ she reminded him.

  ‘How do you think Petr died?’

  ‘From a fever is all we were told.’ She made it sound matter-of-fact but he could hear the soft undertow of choked emotion. It was still raw for her. ‘His end was the beginning of our troubles.’

  Troubles. She was fast becoming his favourite wielder of the understatement. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything from that moment in our lives went bad. Petr’s death was like the siren that set off our spiral into the abyss of despair – or, should I say, pit – that none of us would clamber out from.’

  He sensed the query was rhetorical because she was smirking to herself in what looked to be a private but bitter jest.

  Katerina rallied. ‘Look, I know how dramatic that sounds but it is precisely how I felt in 1942 – I could trace back all the unhappiness to the day Petr died in 1939 … and it summarises how I was feeling when you sat down next to me on the park bench this morning.’

  Daniel suspected there was no point in offering placations. This woman was a survivor. She didn’t need his hollow words. ‘What did your parents explain about Petr? It seems odd that they didn’t say more.’ He needed her to keep talking so he could ease her towards what he wanted her to talk about in depth, but it took a light touch to guide someone towards a subject that they most likely wished to avoid.

  She lifted a shoulder, with an expression of helplessness. ‘Us children, full of our excitement of a happy weekend with our friends, walked back into a house that had been drained of colour, sound, movement and, above all, spirit. Our home was still. Even the hall clock’s pendulum had been tied so it no longer ticked away the minutes. The atmosphere was thick with dread.’ She sighed. ‘And then we heard the wailing. What wouldn’t we have given for the silence to have continued once that began.’

  ‘Your mother?’


  She nodded. ‘She couldn’t be consoled. She wept without pause for days. In the end my father had to call in our physician to have her sedated, but even then she moaned while unconscious. I kept a vigil, for my father was physically drained as well, and I had to continuously remind myself that it wasn’t just my mother’s grief – he too had lost a son. And us … we had lost our only brother, our family favourite because he was so tiny, often sick. However, if you could get Petr to deliver his rare smile, it was as though he reflected the sun. He was one of the chosen – an angel, I’m sure of it. That’s why he was taken from us.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shook her head, taking her time thinking about her response. ‘Because I think he needed to be spared the horror. Petr was still pure; nothing about life had tarnished him yet and so nothing did. He escaped to a better place. We buried him a few days later in a private ceremony just for the immediate family. My parents wanted no other mourners, not even my father’s closest friend, the man honoured with holding Petr at his circumcision.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, Levi was living in England then, so it would have been impossible, but my father simply didn’t want any other mourners. He was damaged and was only just holding himself together for us children while my mother was lost to her grief. She had to be held by us just to stand, and in the end we borrowed a wheelchair, she was so infirm.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry.’

  ‘Her heart was broken and I think everything else about her began to fail. She rarely smiled again. We never heard her pretty voice singing lullabies. The woman I knew as the mother I adored and who loved every bit of me – all of us – began to disappear. Little by little we lost her, a fraction more each day, until within a couple of years she was a skeleton, clothed in living flesh that resembled my mother but nothing of that person was left. Her spirit had fled, perhaps to join Petr.’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine the sad household you lived in.’

  ‘We were never in doubt about our parents’ love for one another, but I was old enough to sense that from 1939 we were living in a house run by people who had become strangers.’

  ‘She blamed him?’

  ‘Yes. I believe she laid Petr’s departure from our family at my father’s feet and I never understood why. It was never discussed, or if it was, then not openly; I wish it had been. I wish I could listen to her rage and understand her pain but she gave us nothing – only her despair and her bitterness. Perhaps she knew Petr’s death was only the first …’

  It was an opening but he didn’t want to leap through it. He needed Katerina to give up her story in her own time. He finally shifted. ‘May I take that from you?’

  ‘Thank you. It was delicious.’

  ‘You are most welcome. You don’t eat much.’ He risked the jest.

  She seemed lightly amused. ‘I eat all meals but breakfast.’

  ‘They must be tiny servings.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I’ve just always been gangly. My three sisters were not. I think they would have grown up to resemble our mother and her line; we can see from photos that her female relatives were petite with big busts, but I was all my father. Always taller than my peers as we moved through childhood, knock-kneed for a while, flat-chested until I was well past my fourteenth birthday. I think Petr may well have turned out the same gangly way; he was long for a newborn, my mother used to remark, and he seemed to grow like a weed, despite being colicky. I still can’t fathom how ill he became in such a short time and sick enough to die …’

  He took their bowls into the kitchen, talking over his shoulder. ‘I’ll put some coffee on. If you need the bathroom, it’s through there.’ He pointed.

  ‘Thank you, I might.’

  When Daniel returned, he could hear water running and Katerina was absent. He set down coffee cups and saucers on the low table, adding a jug of milk and a small bowl of sugar. She reappeared, moving in that familiar glide of hers across the parquet floor. He noticed she felt comfy enough to walk around in stockinged feet. Even without the heels she stood tall, and it was not just her stature but the way she held her body straight and to its fullest height.

  She withdrew her limbs in neat formation, tucking her legs beneath her again on the sofa.

  To Daniel she was like a fascinating piece of origami that could be folded into an impossibly exquisite form. He wished he could stop staring and cleared his throat. ‘You were thinking through something difficult today. Would it help to go back to that topic?’

  Katerina glanced at the window. The softer afternoon light had changed the colour of the room, picking out the floors and panelling with a burnished warmth. Daniel threw another log on the fire and it spat and hissed as fresh flames erupted.

  ‘You really need to learn why you and I happened to meet this morning. It’s relevant or I wouldn’t mention it.’

  ‘All right.’ He felt a trill of guilt. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was in London on loan to the British Museum and I was called in to see if I could help with a fascinating and historic piece of jewellery that had been offered to the museum as an exhibit.’

  ‘Didn’t the museum know its history from its owner?’

  She gave a sad attempt at a smile. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what they had learned from the person offering it. The offer was being made through London solicitors.’

  He nodded, frowning. ‘For privacy purposes?’

  ‘Privacy, and also creating some distance, no doubt.’

  ‘So, they called you in. Why?’

  ‘Because of my expertise in antiquarian jewellery. All museums around the world and particularly those in London and Paris are sensitive about acquiring pieces that may have belonged to Jewish families.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She shrugged. ‘As it turned out, I was able to tell them a great deal about that piece. I knew its provenance and its series of owners from its incarnation to the day and moment of its theft from the Kassowicz family in Prague in 1941.’

  He stared at her, open-mouthed. Katerina stared back at him, fresh fire in the cat’s eye as she remembered.

  ‘Who stole them?’ But he could guess. His voice was thin, as though his vocal cords were stretched in fear.

  And she finally spoke his name. ‘A man called Ruda Mayek. Although he stole a great deal more than just the Pearls …’

  By October 1941 I no longer recognised our lives. The synagogues had been shut down, considered subversive. Jewish children no longer went to school, universities were closed to us, we were registered as ‘Juden’, we were not permitted to use parks or take any entertainment, and my father could only buy food between the hours of four and five in the evening. Our wealth was the buffer but even us children could see it wouldn’t last. There was a place north-west of the city called Terezín; Jews were being rounded up and sent there under the guise of being protected in a place especially built for us. It was originally a medieval fortress but to us it was a walled ghetto. Too many whispers were coming back that it was merely a transit camp for transports east to the concentration camps. We were sure it would be our turn soon.

  With my mother’s withdrawal from life, I had to step into that gap and become mother to my sisters. And I think in some ways I became Papa’s closest companion; we would talk late into the night and this made me privy to not only his thoughts but his knowledge of what was happening to us and our country.

  ‘We’re doing our bit, Papa.’ I was referring to the small museum he had set up. I’d been learning by doing volunteer work at the Ceremonial Hall, with its links to Vienna and various cities in Germany, so I was a genuine help. I say small, but it was garnering much attention and so many items that it had become a full-time occupation: I was no longer attending school and instead curating the articles. Even the Occupiers were comfortable with our endeavour, one Nazi official even quipping to me that when the Jews were wiped out of Europe, it would be good to have a history resource for the German people.

 
As a result of our careful curation over the last two years, I had acquired skills in Jewish reliquary in particular, but we were also permitted to catalogue a lot of the jewellery, art, gold and silver, precious porcelains, sculptures, books … We had a fine collection of porcelain, including my mother’s Dresden dinner sets that were envied in Czech aristocratic circles. Of course, none of that was in our possession any longer. Almost everything we owned – save a few belongings we’d secreted – had been confiscated. Our mansion home behind the city’s centre was now housing a senior Nazi, while our apartment on Parizska Street near the old synagogue was the residence of one of the German officials.

  Synagogues were being destroyed all around us. We were sharing a run-down apartment with three other families. It was only a matter of time before they collected us in one of the round-ups, which is why late one spring evening, huddled around a tiny fire, my father told me his plan.

  ‘Tomorrow I want you to gather up your sisters. Don’t pack anything. I don’t want to draw attention. Put together a few items for your mother – photographs, mainly. They help keep her lucid.’

  I didn’t agree with him on this but I no longer cared that my father was fooling himself on the matter of our mother. If that gave him courage, so be it.

  ‘What about jewellery?’ We’d managed to hide small pieces in the youngsters’ toys.

  ‘Only that which we can carry.’

  ‘The Pearls?’

  ‘I had those moved to the summer villa by a friend.’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘No one is to know.’

  They were our most important item, not just because of the history attached to the Pearls but because of how precious they were to my mother’s family. Their value was incalculable but they were also a liability. I held my tongue as I frowned.

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘We’re leaving the city.’

  ‘Papa!’

  ‘Listen to me. Ever since Hitler appointed Reinhard Heydrich as the Acting Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia I’ve felt our days are numbered. His rise through the Nazi Party has been meteoric and he has supporters in Himmler and Göring – these are fearful men, my darling, with no conscience about us Jews and our plight. Terezín is next for us and I think we will be separated, sent to different work camp. Your mother …’ He couldn’t finish. I chilled at him saying aloud what most adults discussed only out of the hearing of their children. But I was not a child to my father any more; more his conspirator.