‘I am Hilda Scharrel,’ she would remonstrate as if begging to be contradicted. Or she would amble off singing her name tunelessly to herself.
Hilda had been a strapping farm girl, though the light household duties at Dalldorf had turned her brawn to fat. Her fishy eyes peered myopically through bottle-thick lenses. She had a story; everyone had a story, everyone bar Fräulein Unbekannt. She had been promised to her childhood sweetheart, Jonah. Jonah Scharrel. When she spoke of him, her plain broad face would soften and she would smile her rueful, rotten smile. He had gone off to the war, but when he returned he no longer wanted his old life, a plot of land, the arranged future with Hilda. He had wept when the guns fell silent, he told her; while there was war there was hope. He spurned her fleshy comforts, her willing, aching loyalty and fled to Berlin. He wanted only the company of men, men who had seen action. She had followed him, dogging his every move, as he roamed from beer garden to brothel. She debased herself for him, Nurse Bucholz said. She had become a woman of the night, wandering the streets and offering herself to strangers, sleeping in the gutter. Her sin, Nurse Bucholz said, had driven her demented. It was Jonah who had had her committed. She had happily complied, assured that his concern for her indicated a change of heart. That had been two years ago. Time had played tricks on Hilda. Adopting his name, she slipped into the future that she had been cheated of. Frau Hilda Scharrel, brimming with hope, waited daily for her husband to walk up the driveway and fetch her out.
‘Once I am over my little weakness,’ she would say.
A dentist came to Dalldorf once a month to do extractions. Hilda Scharrel was hauled off one Monday morning to have her rotting molars taken out. When she returned her plump cheeks had caved in, her fleshy top lip had become a thin line, her foul-breathed smile a gruesome gummy grin. She wept and raged for several days.
‘What will Jonah say?’ she howled, thickly beating her large fists against the pillow. ‘My looks are ruined. First the specs, now this! He won’t recognise me.’
She wept as copiously as she bled. For days afterwards she spewed out phlegmy cobwebs of blood from the raw cavities where her teeth had been and which were stuffed now with wads of sodden gauze.
For the first time since she had come to Dalldorf, Fräulein Unbekannt felt sympathy. It was a strange sensation, this reluctant leak of feeling. But she pitied Hilda’s illusions, not her pain. She had trouble with her own teeth, the loose ones at the back ached constantly and her gums bled, but she had made no more than mild complaint about them. Once or twice Nurse Malinovsky had given her powders in the night to ease the pain.
‘You really should get them seen to, Fräulein,’ Nurse Malinovsky had advised, but she merely shook her head. She would be a fool to volunteer for any more torture than was necessary.
But watching Hilda Scharrel bemoan her changed appearance, she remembered the bad-luck smile she had been tricked into by the police photographer. There was no way she could take it back, but she could make sure that no one would ever see it again. She hurried along to Nurse Malinovsky.
‘Would it be possible’, she asked, ‘to see the dentist?’
Nurse Malinovsky smiled. A return of vanity, a concern for the physical appearance, was always, in her opinion, a prelude to recovery. It suggested prospects, a future. The dentist, a weedy drunkard, happily obliged. He rarely got a willing patient; usually these wild women had to be held down. He removed eight teeth. He barely needed implements; they would have come away in his fingers.
‘Not to worry, Fräulein,’ he said, holding the teeth in his palm, ‘the other teeth will grow into the space.’
‘Take this one too,’ she commanded, tapping her front tooth.
‘But, Fräulein,’ he protested, ‘this one is healthy.’
‘Take it anyway.’
‘But it is perfectly good. No disease here, the roots are strong.’
‘Just pull it out,’ she said.
He was a biddable man and too afraid of losing his job. There was not much work for a dentist as fond of his spirits as Dr Winter was. In the world outside, patients distrusted a man with a tremor in his hand and the smell of drink on his breath. In here, though, most of them were more malodorous than he was.
‘Do it,’ she said. She recognised a weak man when she saw one.
He tugged and pulled and after twenty minutes of sweating, shaking effort he wrenched the tooth from its moorings. He felt weak and in need of a drink, but the patient hardly raised a whimper.
She was pleased with the result. It made her look gormless and mad. Nobody in their right mind would want to claim her, with a scarred body and now a ruined face. In some other life, the life after this, she promised herself as she nursed her throbbing mouth, I will have a false tooth made, a crown of purest ivory.
CLARA PEUTHERT IS admitted with the same commotion that accompanies all arrivals to Dalldorf – the bucking ambulance slewing to a halt on the gravel forecourt, the slamming of doors, scuffles and protests in the night air. The lights come on in Ward B and Fräulein Unbekannt sees for the umpteenth time a ragged, distressed woman bundled down the centre of the ward and deposited roughly on an unoccupied bed at the far end. The other patients come to with low groans and restive thrashings of blankets, screwing up their eyes at the violence of the light. This one is vociferous and flame-haired, trying to wriggle out of the iron grip of two orderlies who half steer, half drag her across the polished floor. Nurse Malinovsky takes up the rear, clicking her tongue.
‘Now, Clara, hush up, or we’ll put you in the lock-ups. That’ll cool your ardour.’
Clara, distracted by the nurse’s jocular rebuke, falls silent.
‘That’s more like it.’
She sits limply on the bed, where she has been deposited like a sack of potatoes. The orderlies tramp out. Clara meekly dons her grey shift and folds herself under the covers. Within five minutes the lights are dimmed and the ward returns to its rackety sleep. All but Fräulein Unbekannt, who lies awake, aware that at the other end of the room, Clara Peuthert is also lying motionless but alert, watching moon shadows on the ceiling. After a year and a half at Dalldorf the Fräulein knows the difference between careless slumber and vivid silence.
The newcomer is fêted in the morning.
‘Clara!’ Hilda Scharrel cries on waking, fetching her spectacles from the bedside locker and clipping them clumsily around her large ears. ‘It’s Clara Peuthert!’
A chorus of recognition ripples around the ward.
‘You still here then?’ Clara hollers. ‘Hasn’t your old man come to get you yet?’
Hilda, crushed, shakes her head. Then she regains herself.
‘What are you in for?’
‘Fucking neighbours,’ Clara spits, limping down the ward, ‘steal my money from right under my nose, then accuse me’ – she pokes her breast violently – ‘of being mad.’
‘Your old trouble, then,’ Minna Heck says.
Minna is the veteran of Ward B, a 67-year-old drinker and mournful depressive with yellow-greying hair and a hacking cough. Nothing punctures her gloomy resignation. She shuffles towards the showers; slow on her pins, she likes to get a head start on the morning line-up. She also has a stash of methylated spirits hidden in the shower block.
‘I’m not a well woman, Minna,’ Clara shouts after her, ‘they should make allowances.’
She completes the length of the ward, conducting a surly survey.
‘Kick a dog when it’s down,’ she mutters, ‘that’s their motto.’
She reaches bed 15B.
‘And who have we here?’ she asks, narrowing her eyes.
Fräulein Unbekannt, still abed – exempt from therapeutic showers and lice checks – is turned towards the wall. She makes no move, though all her limbs are tense. She recognises challenge when she hears it.
‘Oh, that’s our Fräulein,’ Hilda Scharrel whispers, ‘somebody quite grand.’
The dwarf Hanna lets out a piercing shriek of laughter.
‘And does her ladyship have a name?’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Hilda confides, yards from the bed, ‘she doesn’t.’
‘Don’t be a clot, Hilda, everyone has a name.’
‘No, really,’ Hilda mouths, ‘no one knows who she is. She doesn’t know who she is.’
‘All right, ladies,’ Nurse Bucholz’s voice interjects, ‘way past the bell. On your way.’
Fräulein Unbekannt draws the covers up over her head. For some reason she is filled with dread.
She makes her way to the library, where she spends her mornings in the winter when it is too cold to venture out. She was six months in Dalldorf before she realised there was a library, housed in the main block. It was Thea Malinovsky who had first taken her there.
‘Not a great supply of books, penny dreadfuls mostly,’ she said bashfully, ‘not your sort of thing. But there are newspapers, the Nachtausgabe, Vorwärts, the Berliner Illustrierte. We thought …’ She hesitated.
They were strolling in the grass. It was a gusty morning of speckled autumn. Thea was coming off duty.
‘That is, Dr Hanisch and I …’
‘What has Hanisch got to do with this?’
‘Nothing, really, nothing, it’s just … we thought the papers might help to jog your memory, fill in the gaps?’
Her face smarted with disappointment. She had begun to think of Thea as a companion, not a guardian.
‘We only want the best for you, Fräulein,’ Thea said, ‘restore you to your life, or restore your life to you.’
An icy fury gripped her. She must never trust anyone in here. Ever!
It was in the library that she had her next encounter with Clara. She was sitting on the window seat in the bow window, idly leafing through a romance. She did not have the concentration to read. Plots confused her, the lines of print would swoon into one another. A word would detach itself from its companions – father, fire, water – demanding her special attention. Listen, it seemed to urge, listen to me! She would repeat it to herself, trying a different emphasis each time – light, heavy, nonchalant – in the hope that it would yield up its message, but it would remain contrarily neutral, or worse it would sound absurd, like the preposterous gurgling of an infant. She steadfastly avoided the newspapers, slung in an untidy pile on the oval mahogany table in the centre of the room. She had no intention of cooperating with Nurse Malinovsky’s ruse.
More often than not she was entirely alone in the library, the other patients occupied at their morning work detail. In the afternoons, when they were given a few hours of freedom, Hilda or Minna might saunter in and thumb through the illustrated magazines. But they really came to gossip, not to read. The library was a place of assignation, neutral territory away from the prying eyes of the staff. Male patients from the other ‘quiet’ ward, situated near the kitchen block a good half mile away, congregated in the library after supper to smoke and study racing form in the papers. Half-hearted trysts were arranged, their illicit planning exciting more energy than their execution. Tekla Becker, the flighty teenage daughter of a wool merchant admitted to Dalldorf for nervous exhaustion (she had been caught in flagrante in a horse stall with a stable lad), spent weeks trying to set up a meeting with a shell-shock victim she had spied during male ward exercises in the yard. Notes were passed, smuggled by the kitchen maid, and elaborate alibis concocted, though the meeting in the library never actually took place. Tekla was discharged after only a few weeks, but it had kept her busy and had animated the entire ward in the process.
But in the mornings the library was a haven. The Fräulein enjoyed the solitude and the vacant sense of absence which she could indulge without fear of being roused with questions and promptings. When the door swung open that October morning and Clara Peuthert stood there, regally proprietorial, her heart sank.
Dalldorf had a soothing effect on Clara’s temperament. It was not placid resignation, as it was with most other patients, but a surrender of her spiky bad temper. For Clara, the outside world was a seething sea of hostility, rising seasonally to a boiling spring tide which threatened to submerge her. At that point Clara’s ship tipped, friends were transformed into scheming enemies, neighbours into opportunistic thieves, and her long-suffering brother, who arranged her committals, became the arch-villain of her interior calamity. Her physical complaints also eased at the asylum. The violent outbursts which preceded her admission were always matched by a worsening of her paralysis, but once she had spent her rage the palsy seemed to retreat, her hand ungnarled and hung loosely by her side, her limp became less pronounced. So much so that on the October morning when she marched into the library, Fräulein Unbekannt realised with a start that Clara, at peace, had a certain noble poise and a fiery, flawed beauty.
Clara trails her good hand along the glossy table top as she does a full circle of the room. Her fingertips brush against the scattered newspapers, but she doesn’t bother to pick one up, though that is why she has come. The Nachtausgabe is her favourite; she likes the lurid stories, the loud headlines. But like Fräulein Unbekannt she expected to have the library to herself at this hour. She is unnerved by the peculiar girl from Ward B, the silent one, the oh so haughty one, sitting in the bay of the window framed by murky storm cloud, a novelette open on her lap, sitting there like she owns the place. But it is also the first time Clara has got a clear view of her; in the ward she huddles in her corner bed, her back turned. She neither washes nor eats with the throng; instead of working she moons about the grounds. She is not required to take communal exercise, the nurses practically curtsy before her. All of which inflames Clara’s democratic ire. So it is much against her will that she has developed a sneaking regard for Fräulein Unbekannt. Clara, known by all and sundry – hail fellow, well met on the corridor, cheery backslaps in the ward – has never managed to command such respect. While this pasty-looking invalid has them eating out of her hand. She has seen those little tête-à-têtes with Nurse Malinovsky, the cocoa drinks, the headache powders, and the way Dr Hanisch, usually so briskly non-committal, reserves for her a kind of deference. No doubt she has gone through the usual humiliations imposed on first-timers at Dalldorf, but she has garnered privileges it has taken years for Clara to earn. And she is just a girl. Clara sees how high and smooth her brow is, those grey, melancholy eyes, the cheeky nose and those lips, full and soft and – Clara searches for the word – blossomy.
Clara Peuthert, too, finds herself awestruck, not by the enigma of the Fräulein’s silence, but by the clarity of her presence.
‘Fräulein,’ she says by way of greeting.
The young woman says nothing, as usual.
Inwardly, Clara’s temper flares. Too grand to talk to the likes of me! But she quells it. She wants to be let in, after all. She wants the Fräulein to know she is a worthy person, that she has found an equal in this place full of crazed vulgarity.
‘Excuse me, Fräulein,’ she says softly, ‘but may I say your face seems familiar to me.’
The Fräulein levels a cold stare at her.
‘You do not come from ordinary circles, I can tell,’ Clara persists.
Fräulein Unbekannt appears agitated. She puts a finger to her lips.
Clara feels a tremor of subversion. She has obviously been let into a secret.
Fräulein Unbekannt returns to her book, hoping that might shake off the attentions of Clara Peuthert. It’s a library, after all. Hasn’t she read the sign above the door? Bitte Ruhe.
Clara had found a mission. Excused like Fräulein Unbekannt from work, she took to spending every morning in the library. She knew she was not wanted, so she worked hard to ingratiate herself. For the first few weeks the two women shared a grudging silence, Clara thumbing through back copies of the Berliner Illustrierte while the Fräulein sat in her usual position by the window gazing off into the mid-distance. Her silence was a particular challenge to Clara. The yawning gaps of time made her twitchy. Her gift was for uproar and drama; stalling tension
she couldn’t bear. Sitting for days on end with Fräulein Unbekannt without a word passing between them was a punishing agony. At first it simply made her angry to be so coolly and indifferently shut out. She needed engagement; she was anxious for confidences and greedy for quarrel. But she persevered with her collaboration of tact and deference, so at odds with her own nature. In time she learned that Fräulein Unbekannt’s silence was not dense and uniform. Sometimes it was leaden as fog, or grave and gloomy like the gathering of a winter storm. Or it might be buoyant and good-natured like the jaunty sweep of cloud flurry, or bleached and serene as a clear blue sky. Clara learned to distinguish the ebb and flow so at variance with her natural impatience. And, in the end, she was rewarded. With a smile. A strange lopsided smile, it had to be said. Dr Winter had obviously been at the girl’s teeth. And after the smile, a greeting. She tiptoed extravagantly into the library on 28 October 1921 – Clara would remember the date like a lover’s souvenir – and the Fräulein turned from the window and said bemusedly:
‘Hello, Clara.’
Clara merely smiles and tips her head slightly at the Fräulein as she makes her way to her usual spot at the table. She plucks the Berliner Illustrierte from the top of the pile. They are running a serial in it that she is avidly following, ‘The Girl with the Lion’s Head’, about a young woman with a mop of red hair. It is last week’s copy – the asylum gets all the papers late so that the news has already been digested by the outside world and the papers have been rumpled and tossed by other hands before the patients get to see them. She begins to read. The only difference is that this time she reads aloud. She starts with the blocky headline, ‘The Truth About the Murder of the Tsar’. Beneath is a portrait of the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. Clara traces her fingers around the glossy locks of their hair, the white lace cuffs of their dresses, their small clasped hands. She starts the story: ‘Is One of the Tsar’s Daughters Alive?’
‘Mystery still surrounds the disappearance of the Russian royal family. The Bolsheviks would have us believe that the tsar and his family were executed in a basement room of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg and buried in a mineshaft in the Koptyaki Forest. But we have reason to believe that one of the grand duchesses, Anastasia, the youngest, escaped from her captors and may at this moment be in hiding in fear of her life …’
The Pretender Page 5