by Rosie Thomas
They drank their coffee and listened to Miles’s tourist’s impressions of Berlin. Clio leant closer to Rafael, and he took her hand and folded it under his arm. That was all. Love welled up inside her like spring water.
‘What are your plans?’ Rafael asked Miles.
‘To stay here for a little while. To have a rest, perhaps. I have been working on a book for a long time, and it’s almost completed now.’ Miles’s manner was confiding, almost flirtatious.
‘Clio told me about your book.’
Miles darted a look at her. ‘Clio has been very kind to me.’
‘And to me also,’ Rafael said.
‘Kindness is a fine attribute in a wife.’ He was as delicate as a cat, but the implication was plain. My wife.
‘And in a husband too, I imagine.’
Miles inclined his head. He turned his coffee cup a half-circle on its saucer, and then asked, ‘Do you think I should take a trip out to Grünewald? For a steamer ride?’
‘If you like lakes and steamers and pine trees, why not?’
Clio saw sunlight dancing all the way along Garnisonstrasse. She wasn’t afraid of Miles. The wound would be cauterized and then it would heal over completely.
They sat under the awning for perhaps an hour, until Rafael announced that he must take Clio away, because they were expected somewhere else. There was nothing left for Miles to do but to stand up, shake hands and peck Clio on the cheek.
‘I’ll look in to see you tomorrow,’ he called after her.
‘If I’m at home.’
She turned the corner with Rafael, and they walked on arm in arm.
‘Thank you,’ she said at length.
He smiled. ‘I am glad to have met him.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought he was like a butterfly. One of those velvety-brown ones with pretty markings. And about as substantial.’
They came to the Spree and turned to stroll beside it. The water was grey flecked with blue, and there were dabs of foam on it that made Clio think of waves in the sea.
‘He says that he won’t divorce me.’
Rafael stopped walking. He took her face between his hands and looked down into it.
‘I want to marry you.’
Clio stood still.
‘But if I can’t it doesn’t make any difference. I love you as much and in the same way. Your poor butterfly doesn’t stand in the way of that.’
‘Do you really want to marry me?’ She was minutely conscious of the river and the stone walls, the little bridges with their high backs to accommodate the barge traffic beneath, and the tall brown buildings with their blank eyes.
‘Yes, I do. I would marry you tomorrow, if I could.’
The simplicity of it. The intricate, breathtaking mesh of loving and being loved. Clio took his hands and gripped them until her fingernails dug into his flesh. The intensity of her sudden determination made her voice harsh.
‘Rafael, I want us to leave Berlin. I want us to go away from here, to England, or to France, to anywhere you like but away from Germany. I have never been happy in my life like this and I won’t let it go. If we stay here …’
He loosened his hand from her grasp and put his arm around her shoulder, drawing her face closer to his.
Rafael knew what would happen to him if he stayed in Berlin. It could only be a matter of time before the men in uniform came for him as they had come for the others, those he knew and the hundreds more that he did not. There was still work for him to do here and now amongst those who were robbed of their homes and their livelihoods by the Nazis, but he would be no more use to anyone once he was in prison or in a camp.
For days, Rafael had been debating with himself whether to leave Berlin or to stay until the inevitable happened. To leave would be to run away, he had no doubt of that, but if he did leave there would be some hope for himself and Clio, and the possibility that he could make himself useful elsewhere. The argument went round and round in his head, but he had come no closer to resolving it.
He had said very little to Clio about his anti-Nazi work, because he believed that the less she knew the safer she would be. But it was hard not to be able to share his dilemma with her. He saw her intent face now, and her struggle with herself not to exert too much selfish pressure on him, and he knew how much he loved her.
For an instant, then, the decision seemed simple.
‘We’ll go,’ he whispered, before the moment of clarity deserted him. ‘If you want it so much.’
The sun seemed to swing over Clio’s head, making a dizzy arc in the slot of sky as they held each other.
‘I want to go home, to your apartment. Now, this minute. Please, Rafael.’
‘There is the U-Bahn,’ Rafael said.
A handful of days went by. In a blaze of happiness Clio told Julius, and Pilgrim and Isolde, and Miles himself that she would be leaving Berlin soon, with Rafael.
‘That is the best news,’ Julius said. ‘The best possible news.’ Clio shone with a kind of delight that he had never seen in her before. It made him feel dry and brittle by comparison.
‘Come too. Come back to London,’ she begged him.
‘I might, soon. Not just yet.’ The effort of removing himself from Berlin seemed too great. He had his familiar routines of practice and teaching – even if he could no longer perform in public – and the seclusion of his rooms, and the solitude of his life in the wary city suited him. He could think of nowhere else he particularly wanted to be.
Clio noticed his lethargy, and worried about it, but she knew that Julius was not to be persuaded against his will.
‘You should come home,’ she repeated, but Julius only nodded and smiled absently.
Pilgrim told her, ‘You are right to get out of Germany. It begins to be oppressive, as well as dangerous. I don’t mind a little danger but I can’t bear gloom. Isolde and I have been talking about Paris.’
‘Paris, why not?’ she agreed absently.
Clio was ashamed of their desertion. She knew that she was making Rafael leave the place where he was needed, but she was also certain that there was nothing else they could do. Almost every day they heard news of Jews who were leaving or had already left. The reports of arrests for ‘fighting with Stormtroopers’ or ‘consorting with German girls’ and the unexplained disappearances were so common that they no longer remarked on them. Now that the decision was made she felt a feverish anxiety to be away that she had a struggle to suppress. Rafael was making his own arrangements, and she tried not to hurry him. He was worried about Grete and his father, and about the vulnerable people he would be leaving behind.
At the Klebers’ house she packed her books into a box, addressed it to the Woodstock Road, and took it to the Parcel Post Office in Oranienburg Strasse. She put the cover on the borrowed typewriter and returned the machine to Rafael’s friend.
‘You are leaving Berlin?’ Frau Kleber asked her.
There was no point in denying it. ‘Not yet, but soon. I’m not sure when. Please don’t worry. I shall be quite happy to pay extra rent if you think the notice is too short.’
‘I have heard about many people who are going away,’ Frau Kleber said. Clio felt her sly, appraising glance. There was none of the friendliness that there had been when Clio first moved in. Frau Kleber was trying to gauge exactly what she was harbouring under her roof and just how un-German, how Jewish, the foreign girl might be.
‘You are going back to London with your husband?’
‘Back to London,’ Clio answered, and slipped away into the street rather than stay in the house under the woman’s scrutiny.
‘So you will be in London, and I shall be here,’ Miles only laughed when she told him. Berlin had done him good. His veneer of charm and capability seemed to be intact again. ‘What about your handsome Jewish boyfriend?’
Clio met his eyes. ‘Lover. Let’s not be euphemistic. Rafael will come too. Are you going to stay on?’
‘If you co
uld lend me a little money. I feel that I can write here.’
That was the price, then.
‘How much money?’
Miles named a sum and she offered him half of it, as though they were haggling over a carpet in a bazaar. That was my marriage, she thought. They reached an agreement without much difficulty.
‘I wish you luck,’ Miles said, after he had taken her marks.
Clio focused her thoughts on England. She had begun to feel that she had been away for a very long time. She planned how she would take Rafael home to Nathaniel and Eleanor in Oxford, and then how they would find another flat in London. She would work; perhaps there would be something else she could do for Geoffrey Dawson, or maybe she could go back to Max Erdmann at Fathom. Rafael could do some legal work; they would live an ordinary life together, ordinary people.
It was the middle of September. On the last morning she was still asleep, for some reason sleeping much later and more heavily than she usually did, when Frau Kleber rapped at her door.
‘Someone downstairs for you,’ the woman called out. Even through the thick confusion of sudden waking Clio could hear her displeasure. She crept out of bed and put on her robe, rubbing out a yawn with the back of her hand.
There was a man standing in the brown hallway, looking up, in exactly the same spot where Miles had waited for her before. Frau Kleber policed him, with her arms folded.
It took Clio a moment to recognize him. Even then, she couldn’t remember his name. He was just one of the shadowy men from the Café Josef.
Slowly a kind of realization dawned in her. She stood still, shivering, on the bottom stair. The realization was so terrible that she couldn’t meet it. The warmth of her bed drew her back. She must hide in it, retreat into sleep again.
‘Please come,’ the man said. ‘It is important you come.’
The linoleum under her bare feet felt like ice.
Without a word, Clio turned and ran up the stairs. She fought her way into her clothes, tearing her nails and jerking her hair in her haste.
When she came down the man was waiting for her in the street. There was a thin mist under the whitish sky, and the leaves of the suburban trees were beginning to brown and curl. It would soon be winter again.
They began to walk, so fast that it was almost a run. Clio waited until they had turned the corner out of sight of the Klebers’ house. Then she snatched at the man’s arm. ‘What is it? Where is he?’
The man looked at her, pitying and fearful. He had a thin, undernourished face. ‘They came for him.’
Grete was already at the apartment. She was sitting on the end of the bed, wrapped in an old coat, with her hair loose over her shoulders. She was crying.
Clio looked around her. She saw that Rafael had begun to take his books off the shelves, ready to be packed up. Two of Grete’s blue and green forest landscapes were propped up against the wall, leaving dusty rectangles where they had once hung. This place that had once been warm and safe had never felt so empty and cold.
One of the chairs had been pushed aside; there were no other signs of a struggle. The memory came back to Clio of the first time in the Café Josef, and Heinrich’s story of Herr Keller the lawyer. Grete and Rafael had come in as he was telling it.
A terrible panic washed through her. She stumbled, and knelt beside Grete at the foot of the bed. ‘Where have they taken him? Where?’
Grete shook her head. Her mouth was distorted with her sobbing. ‘I don’t know. It could be Alexanderplatz. Or one of the brown houses. Or Oranienburg, or Dachau.’
Anywhere.
‘What can we do?’
There was no answer. The room was utterly silent except for Grete’s weeping.
Very slowly, Clio reached up and put her arms around her. They clung together, motionless, in the silence.
Seventeen
In the first-floor drawing room of Grace’s house in Vincent Street Alice replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. She stood for a moment looking intently at her reflection in a gilt-framed looking glass that hung over the console table. Then she shrugged and went downstairs to the small room off the hall that Grace used as her study. Alice sat down in her chair and drew a message pad towards her. There were flowers on the desk, arranged yesterday in a little malachite vase by Alice herself. She wrote quickly, setting out the gist of the message that Clio had given her. Then she tore the sheet of paper off the pad and set it neatly in the centre of the blotter. Grace was at a committee meeting and could not be disturbed, but she would see the note on her desk as soon as she came in.
Cressida was downstairs in the kitchen, sitting with one of her story notebooks open in front of her. ‘Who telephoned?’ she asked, as soon as Alice appeared.
‘It was Clio,’ Alice answered briefly. Cressida’s eternal questions made her impatient, and she was in a hurry.
‘From Berlin?’
‘No, not from Berlin. From Jake’s house. She’s back in London, and she wants to speak to Grace urgently.’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Is there anything else you want to know? Because I have to go in a minute.’
‘Got to polish your badge? Or hand out some anti-Jew leaflets?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ Alice said sourly. She gathered up her handbag and gloves and banged out of the room. To live with Grace was important, even essential, but being close enough to Grace meant existing in the same proximity with Cressida.
The two girls didn’t like each other any the better for the amount of time they had to spend together.
Alice let herself out of the front door. She was not going far, only to the party headquarters in the King’s Road. It was not always comfortable, being there, because the other party workers were wary of her, and there was sometimes nothing for her to do. But Alice was very determined. If she waited long enough she was usually given some sort of task, and however menial it was she did it with great care and attention. And there was always the chance that she would see the Leader, even that he would stop to talk to her. That made any amount of tedious clerical work worthwhile.
As soon as Alice was gone Cressida slipped into the study and read the note. It told her no more than Alice herself had done, but she had wanted to make sure. Cressida liked all her Hirsh cousins except for Alice, and she was particularly fond of Clio. It was good news that she was back in London.
Nanny was in the kitchen, looking for her. ‘There you are, dear. Have you had enough breakfast? Would you like me to make you some toast?’
Cressida though longingly of hot buttered toast and jam, but she said firmly that she was not hungry. Cressida had turned thirteen a month before, and she was determined to get thin. Not for reasons of vanity, she assured herself; there was enough vanity in the house with Alice forever fiddling with her face-powder and her hair and her black beret. But Grace set great store by slimness, and Cressida wanted to achieve it just to prove to her mother that she could.
‘You’ll waste away,’ Nanny said comfortably. ‘Give me a hand with these plates, ducky, will you? Miss Alice has gone and left everything, as usual.’
Across London, in Jake’s house in Islington, Clio was also sitting in the kitchen. She was nursing a cup of cold coffee and talking to Ruth. Ruth was still in her dressing gown, a dark blue woollen one that she wore tightly belted over her nightgown and which showed the accumulation of weight on her stomach and buttocks. Her dark springy hair was streaked with grey.
Ruth clattered the breakfast dishes in the stone sink. Jake had gone to his surgery and the two children were at Hebrew class. Ruth had become defiantly more orthodox of late.
‘You look terrible,’ Ruth said in her old, blunt way.
‘It’s that sleeper,’ Clio said. ‘I never do sleep.’
She had arrived from Berlin the previous afternoon. It was true that she had not slept on the train journey, but she had hardly slept either on any of the nights since Rafael had disappeared.<
br />
‘What did milady Grace have to say?’ Ruth asked.
‘She wasn’t there. I left a message with Alice.’
Clio rested her head in her hands. She was overwhelmed by the weight of her own helplessness. In Berlin, in the terrible days after Rafael had gone, she had circled from the Café Josef to every one of the friends that Rafael had introduced her to, round and round, begging for any information or advice that might give her a crumb of hope. All she knew was that ‘a friend’ had telephoned Josef to say that Rafael had been seen in the first light of that morning, being led away by the brown-shirts. He had been coatless and bareheaded. She could find out nothing else. No one knew or no one would say, and she couldn’t fathom which. The utter blankness terrified her. It was as if he had never existed.
With Grete and Julius she had waited, in desperation at first and then as the days passed with the cold beginnings of understanding. They could ask what they liked, but there would be no answers. Questions did no more than draw attention to themselves.
‘I don’t know,’ Josef said. He looked less like the expansive Stulik of the Eiffel nowadays. ‘Who knows anything? He could be anywhere. We can only wait, Fräulein.’
After a week, Clio could bear it no longer.
‘I’m going back to London,’ she told Grete. ‘I know people, important people. If I can’t do anything for him here, I might be able to do it in London.’
She had packed and removed her belongings under the eye of Frau Kleber. Grete and Julius had come with her to the Bahnhof Zoo to see her off. They had hugged one another on the platform.
‘If you hear anything,’ Clio begged, with tears running down her cheeks. ‘Promise me?’
‘I promise,’ Grete said.
Julius stood and waved, a tall, gaunt man in clothes that were too loose for him. Clio watched, leaning from her window until she could no longer see them.
Ruth sat down opposite her now. There were crumbs on the front of her dressing gown. She took Clio’s hand and held it. ‘What do you think Grace can do for your friend?’
‘Rafael is an innocent citizen. He can’t be arrested and held for nothing, for no reason. I want Grace to ask a question in the House.’