The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  Doris skirted the patient crowd and rejoined them.

  ‘When the gates open,’ she said to Franziska, ‘wait for your name to be called. You’ll have to be examined.’

  ‘Examined?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, really. They just want to be sure you’re fit.’ She clapped Franziska playfully on the back. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. You’re as healthy as a trout.’

  At six-thirty sharp the gates opened and the crowd surged forward, leaving Franziska standing alone. It was only when the narrow entrance had devoured the throng that she noticed two policemen standing guard outside twin sentry boxes at either side of the gates. She felt a sharp stab of alarm. Their executioner’s glare reached her across the vast expanse of glistening cobble. She stood petrified, afraid to move in case any movement would betray her. What had Doris told them? Did they know her secret? Standing there in the breaking dawn – the hanging hour – she felt as if she had woken from a crowded, hectic dream to this her final, bleak and solitary punishment. She inhaled, waiting for a shot to ring out. Instead she was startled by a ripple of laughter from behind her. When she turned around she realised she was not alone. A couple of yards away a group of headscarved women stood huddled together, arms folded, faces smug with gossip. Several men also stood leaning against a wall, heads bowed, chins sunk in gnarled hands, caps pushed back resignedly. But unlike the merry women, they stood apart from their neighbours, as if the roll-call for work was something shameful.

  ‘Müller, H.!’ the man with the clipboard called and one of them, a young man with a head of black hair and a sailor’s gait, marched towards the gate.

  ‘Why aren’t you serving your country?’ one of the women barked as he passed.

  ‘Hush up, old woman!’ he hissed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Bergmann, S.!’

  A pale weak sun was visible now behind the factory’s bulk. It gave a glassy look to the morning, as if everything solid were thin as eggshell.

  ‘Schanzkowska, F.!’

  At first Franziska, lost in the humid glare, didn’t recognise her own name. Then she walked forward gingerly, eyes down to avoid the gaze of the policemen who paced back and forth on the apron of cracked pavement outside the factory gates. They were both heavy-set men. Wheezy with age, their double-breasted buttons looked set to pop as they trod heavily, like patient farmyard horses. She could outrun them, Franziska thought as she passed. But there was no need. They were not interested in her. The man with the clipboard looked her up and down.

  ‘Report to the Shifting House. Herr Lindner.’

  She stepped inside and found herself in a pitted yard. Blackened red-brick buildings bore in on her on all sides. A large shed on her left rose three storeys high, with elongated windows that stretched from floor to eaves; ahead a glass and metal walkway straddled between two further sheds. On her right a low block of offices led her eye through a square archway into a second yard beyond. She hesitated.

  Behind her she heard the mournful clangour of the gates as the man with the clipboard pulled them to. She turned around and caught a glimpse through the bars of the few stragglers left outside. A woman with a child on her hip, an elderly man with a stooped back, a boy with a club foot.

  ‘Not changing your mind, I take it,’ the man with the clipboard hollered as he padlocked the gates.

  Franziska shook her head.

  ‘Then no more dawdling. Herr Lindner does not like to be kept waiting.’

  She hurried across the littered yard. Underfoot were the rusty remains of shell bodies, and shavings of bright blue and copper shimmered in the small pools left by the overnight rain. She stepped over the rail tracks which crisscrossed the outer yard, winding their way from a dark entrance close to the gates round a corner into the inner yard, where the Danger Building was. This second yard was overshadowed by a tall chimney stack, but it was open-ended and over a far low wall she could see the metallic toss of the Spree. She paused at the entrance marked Shifting House and pulled open the heavy door. A muffled boom reached her from somewhere deep inside the building. She found herself in a large cloakroom, where dozens of barefoot girls were stripped to their underwear. They were hanging their street clothes on pegs and stowing away their boots in metal cages on the floor. Not only their clothes but every piece of jewellery, every comb and hairpin had to be surrendered.

  ‘All your metal bits and pieces, girls,’ the Lady Superintendent called out, dropping hair clips and brooches into a large muslin bag. ‘And that means stays, as well.’

  ‘Oh, Auntie!’ wailed a pretty, pert girl down to her corset and bloomers.

  All the girls called the superintendent Auntie.

  ‘You know the rules, 474,’ the superintendent barked.

  Auntie knew the girls by their numbers.

  Once undressed, the girls donned gowns and aprons and soft cotton caps. They filed through a gap in a wooden partition at the end of the cloakroom. Franziska made to follow since it was from there that the dull rumble and boom she had heard earlier was coming. A bony hand on her shoulder yanked her back.

  ‘Girl, girl, you can’t go in there,’ Auntie shrieked, ‘you’re not clean!’

  ‘I am clean,’ an offended Franziska bellowed back over the din.

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand, you can’t go through there.’

  She thumped the partition with the palm of her hand.

  ‘No boots or street clothes beyond this point.’

  Franziska looked down at her spattered skirt.

  ‘I’m here to see Herr Lindner,’ she explained.

  ‘Ah, a beginner,’ said the superintendent, ‘don’t they tell you anything? Out the door and up the stairway outside, if you please.’

  Herr Lindner was a fastidious man, balding, with a sharp nose. He sniffed all the time as if he were catching a bad smell. Was it her? Franziska wondered. He peered through round spectacles as she knocked and entered his office. The far wall of the room was a trellis of glass and he was standing looking down at the factory floor far below.

  ‘Schanzkowska, sir,’ Franziska said, as he turned to see who it was.

  He moved slowly to his desk and sat down with pointed deliberation.

  ‘Schanzkowska,’ he repeated doubtfully, shuffling papers in front of him.

  ‘Doris Wingender in the Tailor’s Shop recommended me and the man on the gate told me to …’

  ‘Just so,’ Herr Lindner interjected, silencing her.

  He rose and with his hands behind his back came out from behind his desk and surveyed her. Up and down. Then he walked around her as she stood fidgeting and staring straight ahead. He paused at her back for several minutes and clicked his tongue.

  ‘Not very tall, are you?’

  He circled around her again, jutting his face close to hers.

  ‘Look up,’ he commanded. He stared intently at the whites of her eyes. Then he took her chin in his hand. Startled, she thought for a moment that he was going to kiss her.

  ‘Teeth,’ he said, letting his hand drop.

  Her hand immediately replaced his, covering her lips.

  Her father’s words came back to her. Never let an ill-wisher see your teeth.

  ‘Fräulein Schanzkowska, please open your mouth.’

  She stood up, lips firmly pursed, her fingers knotted in a bunch.

  ‘God grant me patience! In case you haven’t noticed, Fräulein Schanzkowska, there is a war on. I have no time to dally. Please show me your teeth or I shall have to show you the door.’

  She dropped her hand and opened her mouth slowly. He pushed up her upper lip and peered at her teeth. She closed her eyes tight, her cheeks smarting with humiliation.

  ‘Hands,’ he barked.

  She held her hands out, palms down. He took them between his fingers and revolved them.

  ‘Well, you’re not afraid of hard work to judge from these.’

  He dropped them.

  ‘This is very fine
work, Fräulein, it requires delicacy.’ He enunciated his words carefully.

  She burrowed her rough hands deeper into the folds of her skirts.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Seventeen, sir. And three-quarters.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Are you willing to work in mercury?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, remembering Doris’s instruction to agree to anything she was asked.

  ‘What about yellow powder?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Trotyl, my dear.’

  He sighed deeply and then with a military flourish he clicked his heels and walked measuredly back to his desk.

  ‘Well, you’re healthy and strong by the looks of you. We’ll put you on trolley work to start with. That won’t require much finesse.’

  ‘Don’t know why Lindner keeps on sending me women,’ Franz Gering complained when Franziska appeared in the loading bay. He handed her a tunic and gaiters and a paint-spattered mackintosh coat.

  ‘Not many men left around here,’ a female voice called from the darkness of the loading shed. ‘Real men, that is.’

  This was followed by a large guffaw as several carriers emerged out of the shed to view the new recruit. They were a motley crew, some lanky teenage boys, a pair of beefy men, a couple of strong girls like herself.

  ‘Well,’ Gering conceded, ‘at least you’ve got some meat on you. Your job is to keep these bogeys moving. It may not look like much but you’ve got to keep the factory fed. You’ll be on Team Four.’

  The trolleys were deep flatbed trucks with high perambulator handles which ran on runners through the yards. They worked four to a trolley, hauling shells from the Finishing Shop to the Loading Yard, and carrying shell cases and cartridges from the Machine Room to the Danger Building. Day and night the machines ran, clanking and grinding, all polished limbs and burnished plates, a merciless cavalry of iron horses, rearing and neighing in the dry, fumy heat. They were tended to as if they were tethered animals not yet broken in. Franziska often overheard the machinists coaxing them tenderly into action, but once up and working they were driven relentlessly. Levers were yanked roughly, wheels cranked, the wide leather belts of the machines set spinning dryly, while the lathes whinnied and screeched. The din was tremendous. There was barely time to rest while the trolley was unloaded and filled up again with finished shells. Then it was back out into the yards again pushing with all their might, even though the tracks underfoot were regularly oiled. It was hot, sweaty work. Franziska was used to labour, but here she felt weak and puny, dwarfed by her surroundings and her own insignificance in this feverish cycle of masculine work with no visible harvest. One of hundreds – her assigned number was 670 – she was just one more body enslaved not to an end but to an effort, the war effort.

  Franziska would never fully comprehend the geography of war, the great battle sites, the muddied victories of the Western Front, even later when she had good reason to. This was where she sited her war, in the tedious journeys through the yards and sheds of the munitions factory. She thought of the Tailor’s Shop as the Home Front. Here caps and gowns were run up on treadle sewing machines. It was the only place in the factory where the loudest noise was human, full of girlish chatter and the comradely gaiety of a sewing bee. Elsewhere talking was either futile or forbidden. In the Machine Rooms it was too noisy to be heard – Franziska thought of the roar of battle – and in the Danger Building, it was a finable offence to speak. Here, Franziska imagined, was the mute imminence of the trenches. The workers sat in regimented rows, hooded and hidden, swathed in veils and fireproof overalls buttoned to the throat, weighing out trotyl on small hand scales or filling tiny bags from trays of powder. Their silent concentration on this minute work seemed to tick louder than any clanking machine. And their yellowing, discoloured skin marked them out already as weary survivors of some small, private calamity.

  THAT FIRST DAY seemed endless. Outside the air was humid, the sky low and overcast, the sun glowered and glared but failed to smile. Inside, the dull light filtering through the mottled windows of the filling shops hung in dusty shafts along the alleyways between the machines. Franziska’s brow seeped, rivulets of sweat poured down her cheeks unchecked. As the four carriers heaved and pushed their trolley – when it was full of finished shells it was so heavy their chins were at handle level trying to shift it – she felt like a horse tethered to a plough. When they lifted the shells off at the end of each run, two of them staggering beneath the molten, menacing weight, they cradled fifteen kilos between them. She was unbearably thirsty, but they were allowed only two comfort breaks per shift – one for the canteen, one for the lavatory. Any more and their pay would be docked. They were under the constant scrutiny of Herr Lindner, standing in his glassy cage high above the works floor. They must have looked like ants to him, milling around the clanking machines and trestle tables, Franziska thought. And at any moment he could move his foot and simply squash one of them for no better reason than they did not please him.

  High on the gable of the works floor, under the arced legend which read ‘Cleanliness, Gentleness and Punctuality’, a placid clockface marked time. Franziska learned to concentrate on it. That way she could time each trip. Sometimes the minutes ticked by astonishingly slowly; at others, when Franziska dared to look up through the falling wisps of her hair, several hours had gone by. The lights in Herr Lindner’s office went on at six p.m., like a magnified version of its occupant’s glasses, adding to the air of vigilance as if his attention became more, not less, concentrated as the day wore on. In time, Franziska would not need to look at the clock or note the turning on of the lights to recognise the hour. She knew it by the twinges in her body – the dull ache in her lower back, the sharp tightening around her shoulder blades, the livid blooms of bruises on her calves and upper arms. But when the knocking-off hooter brayed at seven-fifteen p.m. that first day she fell to the floor of the machine shop and lay there exhausted amongst the metal shavings and sawdust. Way up above her through the skylighted roof she could see the sooted felt of a darkening sky and the sly grin of a half-moon. She felt protected lying there, the machines stuttering to a halt, the unaccustomed silence sprouting in her ears. She closed her eyes and was a child again, lying in freshly cut hay with a sea of blue overhead.

  ‘Sissy. Sissy,’ a voice calls.

  Her mother calling her in.

  ‘Franziska, are you all right?’

  She opened her eyes to Doris.

  ‘Yes, I’m just so tired.’

  ‘You must be careful, Franziska.’ Doris cast an anxious eye up at Lindner’s perch at she helped Franziska to her feet. ‘Lindner watches everything. If he thinks you’re not up to it, it’s the chop! War or no war.’

  Released by the hooter’s glare, the departing day shift was not the grim throng of the morning. The men, glistening from their toils, halted at streetside stalls for tankards of cider or walked three and four abreast their arms flung around one another, calling out bawdily to women standing in doorways, clusters of children at their feet. The female workers chattered noisily at factory pitch, the echoes of the machines still bellowing in their ears. Doris and Louise, at either side of Franziska, gossiped across her, Doris, mostly, and though Franziska said nothing she felt included in their lazy, familiar conversation.

  Frau Wingender was cooking when they got back to the apartment. A glorious smell of roasting wafted through the stairwells as they climbed to the second floor.

  ‘I do hope that’s coming from our kitchen,’ Louise said.

  Franziska heard the wistful tone. Frau Wingender’s domestic chores were entirely dependent on the hour at which she started tippling. Two beers before dinner ensured a hearty welcome. Any more and they were likely to be greeted by the chaotic ruins of a burnt dinner, or the cold comfort of leftovers.

  ‘Girls! Girls!’ Frau Wingender beamed at the door.

  Franziska found it hard to imagine that the slovenly h
eap they had left lying in the bed in the morning could be the smiling jovial hausfrau now before them, who bustled around the steam-filled kitchen, humming and stirring.

  ‘Dear me,’ she said, taking one look at Franziska. ‘Look at this child. Dead on her feet.’

  She sat Franziska down at the kitchen table and from one of her secret stashes produced a bottle of schnapps. She poured out a tumbler full.

  ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the glass under Franziska’s nose.

  Franziska got a waft of father, that sweet, raw smell of spirits. As if he were standing beside her. She took the glass and swallowed the fiery brew in one go, as if to inhale her own memories, to have her father safely within again.

  ‘Lindner put her on the trolleys,’ Doris explained.

  ‘It’s not right,’ Louise interjected hotly. ‘It’s too heavy work for a girl.’

  ‘But I’m strong,’ Franziska said, the alcohol coursing through her weary limbs giving her a peppery energy.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Frau Wingender, ‘but for how long?’

  She gazed at Franziska for several moments with a kind of bemused tenderness. Frau Wingender had two faces, Franziska was to learn, the cranky landlady of the night before and this ramshackle woman with her rapt spasms of motherly affection.

  ‘Doris,’ she commanded, ‘fetch the tub. This child needs a soak or she’ll seize up.’

  The tin bath was fetched from its home – hanging outside by a hook below the kitchen sill – and Louise and Doris boiled two cauldrons of water. As Franziska undressed – less shyly than she had the night before – the Wingender sisters lathered some soap in the bath. When she stepped into the tub, she sank into a sea of foam. She had never been so grateful to be immersed, Frau Wingender’s mutton stew bubbling on the stove and the tingling fire of schnapps within.

  ‘I’ve had some good news, girls,’ Frau Wingender said, as Louise rubbed Franziska down with a towel. ‘We’ve got a new lodger for Herr Wunder’s room. I met Frau Goldberg, you know, from Elberfeldstraβe, at the market, and she’s sending me on one of hers, a nice Jewish boy, it seems. He’s been with her for several months, she knows his mother. But she got the chance to take in a pair of army clerks and couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Isn’t that a stroke of luck?’