The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  The noise was deafening. The children’s shrill cries, the bellow of porters, the bombast of trains bloomed in the cathedral vault of the station. The thick metal hand of a large clock suspended in the wafting smoke moved haltingly over Roman numerals, shivering slightly as if time here were heavy. The air was speckled with flakes of soot and rank with grime and sweat. Gripping her case, she pushed against the seething throng, battling her way out onto the street. She stopped for breath at the grand entrance, inhaling great mouthfuls of city air. She was here; she had finally made it. Berlin!

  The sun had gone down, leaving the tall buildings steeped in an invalid’s pallor. All around her the city was in a fever. Trams clattered and sang across a vast cobbled square. Overhead on an elevated bridgeway a train rumbled and roared. Knots of young men in uniform brushed by her, hands raised in mock salutes or holding tankards of beer aloft. A couple embraced hungrily at the kerb, his kitbag at his feet, her straw hat tipping, then falling from her shoulders, unnoticed, and swept away by the light ruffle of breeze which had sprung up. Franziska followed its path as it bounced and rolled on the cobbles at people’s feet, its polka-dot ribbon fluttering gaily like a token of the frantic mood. From the brassy glow of a beer cellar across the square she could hear the brazen strains of music and triumphant voices raised in ragged harmony. A row of military trucks growled by, their tarpaulins flapping at the back to reveal a tableau of eager boys in field grey. One of them leaped down and rushed at Franziska, landing his fleshy lips on hers.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ he said, ‘for the Fatherland!’

  Before she could protest he had scurried after the lorry, clambering on board to the cheers of his companions as the truck slewed drunkenly away into the lilac twilight. Franziska wiped the taste of him off her lips. She felt a bleakness steal over her. This was what she had always wanted. Escape and anonymity. But she felt as lonely as the petrified house she had come from. Her fatherland.

  There was nothing there for her. Only her mother and Felix. The house, once so vividly cared for, was crumbling into a wilful chaos. Franziska could not counter her mother’s absent-minded determination to let her tidy kingdom slide into ruin. The kitchen descended into an encrusted mess of meals begun and not finished, broths and sauces left to boil over, loaves burnt to a crisp in the oven, as if suddenly in the midst of a task her mother would succumb to a lethargic amnesia. For years she had lost herself in the dead march of domestic chores; now she could not forget herself sufficiently to press on with the daily grind. The autumn hours, which she would have spent carefully pickling, were passed in a dreamy idling, as if doing nothing required all her concentration. She seemed not to notice the passing of the seasons. Beets and cabbages rotted in the ground. Marrows went to seed. Only her geraniums flourished, as if repaying all her years of prodigal pampering. They bloomed hectically, as if trying to catch her attention. She watched with the baffled air of a child when Franziska scrubbed around her, or cleared a space on the table to roll out dough or chop vegetables. Without her husband, Mrs Schanzkowska’s avid skills of home-making were redundant. She had been trained to be a wife, but she did not know how to be a widow.

  Franziska’s father had died in the summer of 1913. His illness was unlike anything else about him; it grew quietly, stealthily. It was not like his nature, volatile and explosive. It bided its time. At first it was no more than extreme fatigue and such an aversion to alcohol that when he so much as whiffed a drop on another man’s breath it would make him gag. He began to shrink. His skin, which had always been ruddy, turned sallow and pitted as a walnut, as if he was developing a hard carapace to protect himself. His fingernails fell out. They simply crumbled away like chalk dust. He ate feebly. He sat, jaundiced, liver-eyed, exuding a kind of insular gloom. For the first time in his life his thoughts turned inward, finding there some mesmeric focus. Franziska feared that his old outbursts of rage were bottled up inside him and would emerge in one all-consuming tide which would destroy them all. She it was who cajoled him into eating. When he toyed with his food she would pull the plate sideways and chop his meat or dumplings into bite-sized pieces, pointing to each morsel as she would to a child.

  ‘Now,’ she would say, ‘try this one.’

  Her mother shaved him with the cut-throat. He had always been careless about his appearance, but her mother’s finesse with the blade rendered him frighteningly clean. Franziska could not bear to watch. If the blade were to slip … Felix took him for walks around the yard, guiding him tamely round and round in ever-decreasing circles, this cleaned and polished father, silent and acquiescent. They had finally made him weak, Franziska thought.

  Felix was the man of the house now, taking his father’s place in the fields.

  ‘And the meek’, her mother said, watching her slow, patient son, ‘shall inherit the earth.’

  Franziska tried not to remember her father’s last days. A great hulk of a man all hollowed out by disease. He smelled dreadfully. Even if he hadn’t, neither she nor her mother had much appetite for nursing him. It was not a lack of fastidiousness that prevented them from changing his sheets as often as they should have. It was indifference. His years of bullying and neglect had numbed them; their haphazard care of him was a kind of low-lying revenge. Franziska’s surfeit of feeling for him had seeped away into a steely pity. She looked back on her fiery devotion for him as if it were a fevered illness that had run its course. But she could not summon it up again.

  It was Felix who would sit with him when the open sores on his ulcerated legs meant he could no longer walk. And when he breathed his last Felix was by his side, while Franziska and her mother sat in the kitchen shelling peas. It was a noisy procedure with which the tinny report of greens in an enamel pot could not compete. He died cursing and swearing and bellowing for Felix, as if the very fact of his despised son was the meaning of his passing.

  Franziska crossed the square scored by the sweeping curves of tram tracks like the skate marks on a frozen pond. She tried to dispel the eerie aimlessness she felt by striding purposefully along, but the wintry thoughts of home stayed with her. On her arm she carried Mother’s Poznan coat, a bulky black broadcloth with an astrakhan collar, the most glamorous item of clothing her mother owned. She would hardly miss it, Franziska thought; indeed it would probably take her days to register that her daughter was gone. Franziska had run away, stealing away in the dead of night, with money purloined over months from Felix’s trips to the market. Mother’s eggs had paid for the fare. In her suitcase she had one change of clothes, a matryoska doll, and the pendulum from Grandmother Dulska’s clock. The gentle swing of it trapped behind its door of glass had caught her eye as she was leaving. She drew up a chair and standing on it she opened the door and unhooked the pendulum, thus stilling the clock for ever. There it would stand at the time she had made her escape.

  She hurried along, eyes cast down so as not to attract attention. She reached the far side of the square and turned onto a side street steeped in shadow. A balmy dusk was gathering. A mobile coffee stall stood at the corner, an iron contraption on wheels topped by two gleaming vats of grounds. A bearded man with an apron was dispensing the coffee from a metal tap on the side into slim glasses. The smell of chicory was pungent. She stopped to inhale the dark fumes.

  ‘Fräulein?’

  A fair-haired young woman of her own age, plumply good-looking and smartly dressed, was tugging at her sleeve. She proffered her steaming glass.

  ‘Would you like to try?’

  Was it so obvious, she wondered, that she had never tasted coffee? But she took the glass gratefully. It was piping hot. The initial taste was more bitter than she had expected, but there was a sweet legacy in her mouth from the sugar that the young woman had obviously laced it with.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, handing the glass back.

  ‘From the east?’ the young woman queried. She had a fresh, curious face. ‘You have come to Berlin to work?’

  Franziska nodded.
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br />   ‘Do you have a place to stay? Some lodgings perhaps, or with some compatriots?’

  ‘No,’ Franziska said slowly. ‘I must …’ she started.

  ‘Then you are in luck! My mother takes in lodgers. In fact,’ she confided, ‘she sent me to the station to meet the evening train. Our last lodger left hurriedly, and without paying, and my mother said, Doris, that’s me, run down to the station and make approaches. There’s bound to be some lost soul looking for a bed. But I was late. The streets are hopping, the war has brought the city alive. And then’, she added ruefully, ‘the smell of coffee. I couldn’t resist.’

  Doris handed Franziska her glass and she took another sweet, gritty mouthful.

  ‘We could pretend that we met on the platform.’ She took in Franziska’s appearance in a swift, appraising glance, her creased, sober skirt, her rough-hewn tunic, the well-worn shawl. ‘You look like a good sort, respectable …’

  ‘I have very little money,’ Franziska countered, ‘and I have no work.’

  ‘We’ll get you work. Louise, that’s my sister, and I are on the production line at the AEG plant. This war will make work for everyone.’

  Franziska hesitated. Could she trust this friendly young woman? She could have an accomplice waiting round the next corner, ready to pounce. Then she thought of the meagre coins left over from her mother’s egg money.

  ‘Say you will,’ Doris pleaded. ‘It will save me from my mother. She will think I have done very well for her.’

  Frau Wingender was a stout, raddled woman with a beery face, who stood crossly outside Beusselstraβe 27 awaiting Doris’s return.

  ‘You took your time,’ she barked by way of greeting. ‘Dawdling, no doubt. And who’s this?’

  ‘This is Fräulein Schanzkowska. I met her at the station just as you said.’ Doris nudged her.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, I would not have known where to turn if Doris hadn’t appeared.’

  ‘A Pole,’ Frau Wingender said, ‘and with no visible means of support, I’ll be bound.’ She turned on her heels and disappeared into the dingy mouth of the apartment building, hands on her hips. Franziska remembered the words of Miss Tupalska – you are a little Prussian girl living in the German Reich. Doris hurried after her, down the rank passageway that led into the bowels of the building.

  ‘Louise and I can get her a job at the factory. They’re crying out for workers there. And she can share our room. That means you can take in another lodger in Herr Wunder’s old room.’

  Frau Wingender paused. Franziska watched her broad, implacable back.

  ‘Well,’ Doris’s mother said slowly, ‘that’s a thought.’ She was relenting. Money was Rosa Wingender’s primary creed.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, turning around to take another look at Franziska standing on the street, her feet aching and her stomach growling with hunger. ‘But you, my girl, better get work quick smart. The rent is still five marks a week, job or no job. I’m not running a charity home here.’

  Doris smiled winningly.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you to the royal quarters.’

  It was a long, narrow room on the second floor. A blanket hung on a string dividing it in half. Frau Wingender slept on one side on a divan pushed up against double doors, which gave onto the lodger’s room. The girls slept on the other side, two beds crushed a thigh’s distance apart and wedged beneath a tall window, which looked out onto the building’s back courtyard. A pecked-looking tree, stunted by the lack of light, scraped against the pane. Mottled masonry bearing the geography of damp peered in from outside. Lines of becalmed laundry were strung across the blind windows opposite. The dust-mottled glass added to the room’s stifled air. Cobwebs shivered in the corners of the high ceiling. Doris closed the shutters and pushed the two dishevelled beds together.

  ‘There,’ she said, throwing a dark green coverlet on top of the unmade beds. ‘Plenty of room for all of us!’

  She pulled open the bottom drawer of a large chest, which stood in the corner of the room, and deposited a nest of stockings and smalls on the bed. ‘This can be yours and we’ll find space in Mama’s wardrobe for your dresses.’

  Franziska opened her spartan suitcase.

  ‘There’s not much,’ she said apologetically.

  She fished out her second skirt, a creased linen blouse and her home-made bloomers and laid them on the bed beside the Poznan coat. Her fingers did not stray into the sateen pocket sewn into the inside spine of the case, where she had hidden the painted doll and the pendulum. These were things which she did not want Doris – or anyone else – to see. Here they seemed like guilty clues. Hurriedly she shoved the case under the bed.

  ‘Wait till you get your wages,’ Doris said brightly as she folded Franziska’s scratchy underwear. ‘We can go shopping at Jandorf’s!’

  Strange house. Unfamiliar noises – shouts rising up from the street, loud arguments from the courtyard below, the slamming of doors, a woman sobbing, the night terrors of an infant. Lying head to toe between the Wingender girls while their mother snored loudly beyond the makeshift curtain was almost like being at home, a child again between her own sisters, Gertie and Maria. And Walter. She would not think of Walter. When she did there was only water and death. She willed these old memories to lose their power. A new life was about to begin. A life of her own.

  ‘RISE AND SHINE!’

  Franziska opened her eyes to find Doris bending over her. She was already dressed and busily tucking a white madras blouse into the band of a whipcord skirt of powder blue. She straightened and turned back to the speckled mirror that stood on the chest of drawers.

  Clamping a hairpin between her lips, she swept up the stray tendrils of her honey-coloured hair.

  ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ she said as she slid a comb into the tidy bun at the nape of her neck.

  Louise was sitting on the edge of the bed, braiding her hair into two plaits. The younger of the two, she had been given a more sober measure of her sister’s noisy good looks. Her face was thin and long, where Doris’s was fleshily round, her hair nut brown without the glossy kink of her sister’s, her eyes frowningly dark. She knotted a bandanna round her forehead, and threw on a dark worsted tweed coat.

  ‘But you have to make an effort. Where else would I get to wear these stockings? And I do love this skirt,’ Doris said, smoothing her hand over the pale blue fabric. She perched her hat on top of her piled hair and twirled around in the blue-grey morning light. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We’re only going to the factory, Dor,’ Louise said, ‘not to a ball.’

  ‘Hurry, hurry,’ Doris said to Franziska, who was sitting up in bed with the coverlet drawn up around her shoulders. She felt awkward and shy. She might have shared a bed with these girls, but dressing under Doris’s scrutiny would be an ordeal. Nothing would have measured up. Her plain black skirt, her rough linen shirt, her threadbare shawl. Yesterday she had been glad of Doris’s brassiness and her flirtatious friendliness. Now it seemed like a female challenge.

  ‘We’ll wait for you in the kitchen. Let you get dressed in peace,’ Louise said, nudging Doris out.

  Franziska splashed her face with water from a jug and basin on a stand by the bed and dressed hurriedly. She swept past the musty blanket which divided the room, passing the mound in the bed that was Frau Wingender. She was not an early riser. She liked to stay up into the small hours. The tell-tale beer bottles still on the table in the tiny scullery down the hall bore testimony to her predilection for solitary late nights. The girls were standing round the littered table, drinking tea. A sunken green light pervaded the room. A stove listed on the scarred floorboards, a white ceramic sink hosted a pile of teetering saucepans, the doors of the wall cupboards all stood ajar as if a fruitless search had recently been conducted. Their shelves were crowded to overflowing – ill-matching cups and plates, the handle-less casualty of a jug shared quarters with flour bags, a jar of dripping, the tallow-spattered stump of candle, a pile of coupons,
a blackened tea caddy, a dish of melting butter. It made Franziska think of home, but here it was not the hand of wilful neglect that was evident but a cherished, careless overuse. Looking at Doris standing there, neat as a bandbox, it was hard to believe that she had sprung from such wanton clutter.

  ‘All set?’ she asked cheerily.

  She handed Franziska a lidded coffee pot of battered brown enamel.

  ‘This will keep you going. We always make our own, cheaper and better than that muck they serve in the canteen.’

  The three girls clattered down the stone steps of the hallway and into the dawn-blanched street. It had rained overnight and the cobbles were greasy underfoot. The streets were thick with people. They joined the silent throng, the wordless tramp of hundreds of workers, men and women, pale and glue-eyed with sleep, heads down, shrouded in the smoky, early-morning mist. The only sounds were the plangent leak of birdsong, the chafing of serge and gabardine and the steady clunk of boots on stone. They funnelled through the narrow streets, gathering more people as they marched. There was an odd comfort to be among so many strangers all bound for the same destination. They arrived at the factory yard at six-twenty. A great crowd had already gathered at the gates. A hooter from somewhere within brayed in short, sharp bursts like an animal bellowing to be fed. Doris pushed her way to the front of the crowd and spoke to a man in a cloth cap and mustard coat, who stood, clipboard in hand, at the entrance. They talked for several minutes while Doris gestured urgently towards Franziska.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Louise said, ‘if anyone can get you in, Doris can.’