The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘A Jew?’ Franziska said.

  She thought of the peddler who pushed his cart through Borowy Las once a year, or the strange, secretive figures in long coats who populated the marketplace in Bytów. Never trust a Jew, her father used to warn them as children. But she had never met one not to trust.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between them and us is that they don’t go to church on Sundays,’ Frau Wingender said. ‘I only hope he won’t be fussy about his food.’

  The new lodger arrived the following week while the girls were out at work. As they ate their evening meal, they could hear his heavy footfall moving about in his room.

  ‘So nice to have a man about the house again,’ mused Frau Wingender, ‘a respectable man.’

  As opposed to Herr Wunder, who, it seemed, had led Frau Wingender up the garden path in more ways than one.

  ‘He was a complete rogue,’ Louise had told Franziska, ‘anyone could see that. Anyone but Mama, that is.’

  ‘She gets lonely,’ Doris said apologetically, ‘without Pappy.’

  ‘Good riddance to him,’ Louise muttered under her breath.

  ‘He ran out on us when we were children,’ Doris explained. ‘Left Mama high and dry with nothing, no money, nothing. He has another wife and a couple of brats in Prenzlauer Berg.’

  ‘It’s why she has a weakness for a tipple,’ Louise offered. ‘And Max Wunder did nothing to discourage her.’

  ‘We were just as pleased when he went, to tell you the truth,’ Doris said. ‘Imagine having Herr Wunder as a stepfather.’

  ‘He was such a buffoon!’ Louise confided, while Doris marched around the kitchen imitating him, sticking out her belly and blowing out her cheeks. ‘And just imagine we would have been the Wunderkinder!’

  The sisters exploded into laughter.

  ‘And what’s the big joke?’ demanded Frau Wingender, puncturing their girlish jubilance.

  The girls tried to smother their mirth.

  ‘Nothing, Mama, just factory talk, that’s all.’

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive these silly girls, Herr Fröhlich. I’ll make sure they won’t trouble you. Doris, Louise, I’d like to introduce Herr Fröhlich.’

  From behind Frau Wingender’s ample figure a neat young man emerged. He had close-cut, straw-coloured hair, a strand of which fell over his forehead, a long pale face, a small fleshy mouth. His eyes were a washed-out blue. Doris and Louise exchanged a sisterly glance. Franziska, who had not been included in the introduction, watched as Herr Fröhlich stepped into the kitchen, his hands behind his back.

  ‘Herr Fröhlich has a job in the Tietz department store,’ Frau Wingender announced grandly. ‘In haberdashery.’

  ‘And who is this lady?’ Herr Fröhlich asked.

  ‘That’s Fräulein Schanzkowska, she lodges with us too,’ said Frau Wingender. ‘She shares with my girls.’

  ‘Schanzkowska,’ he said, ‘one of our Polish cousins.’

  He extended his hands. Franziska felt it would be too intimate to touch it. And she was ashamed to offer her rough-hewn fingers to this well-groomed stranger. She did a little curtsy instead. Doris and Louise exploded in a fresh peal of laughter.

  ‘He’s not the kaiser, Franziska,’ Doris said.

  ‘There’s no harm in showing respect,’ Frau Wingender said, ‘you could do with a little bit more of it yourself, young lady.’

  Franziska blushed and covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘My name is Hans,’ Herr Fröhlich said. ‘Hans Walter Fröhlich.’

  Water clouded Franziska’s vision. Was she crying or drowning? She could not remember what happened next; one minute she was standing avoiding Herr Fröhlich’s gaze, the next she was stretched out on the floor cradled in Doris’s arms while Frau Wingender fed her a thimbleful of schnapps.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked weakly.

  ‘You fainted, my dear,’ Frau Wingender said, patting her hand. ‘They’re working you too hard at that plant. You’re not as strong as you think.’

  ‘I think it was Herr Fröhlich,’ Doris said wickedly. ‘I wonder, does he have that effect on all the girls!’

  For the first few weeks Berlin remained a series of interconnecting rooms for Franziska – the Wingenders’ cramped quarters, the cacophonous apartment building, the winding route to work, the ordered uproar of the factory. She had to keep on remembering that she was in a big city. Apart from that first evening at the station she had not seen the sweeping boulevards, the great monuments, the glittering department stores that Doris so often talked about. It struck her as she rose each morning how similar her life here was to the one she had lived at home – the ceaseless labour, the huddled and impoverished intimacy of the Wingenders. Even the eggs – especially the eggs – were a disappointment. When Frau Wingender cracked open a shell at the table to make stollen bread, the yolk was pallid, the white more glaucous. The air around her seemed thinner, extenuated by too many people drawing on it. In those first weeks Franziska fell prey to a crushing homesickness; it was not just a yearning for fresh eggs or the ferny green freshness of the countryside. She had expected Berlin to enlarge her. Instead she felt diminished, as if her world would always be small and mean and limited, no matter where she went. It seemed her destiny to be confined.

  Sometimes, though, there were glimpses. Sedan Day was one, celebrated on a balmy September afternoon. Although it had nothing to do with this war – Hans Fröhlich told the girls it was a celebration of the victory over the French more than forty years before – it felt like an endorsement of the kaiser’s pledge that victory would be achieved before the leaves fell. Doris, Louise and Franziska took a tram into the city and walked the festive streets. In the large department stores, in place of mannequins, shop staff and customers filled the display windows to get a grandstand view of the parade as it passed. News-vendors hollered at street corners and every couple of yards there were advertising pillars loud with posters for circuses, music halls and athletic clubs. Cyclists frantically ringing their bells wove in between the crowds, dodging small children and street hawkers selling matches and single roses. The girls eventually found a spot at the edge of the pavement near the railway bridge at Friedrichstraβe from which to view the proceedings. So great was the crush that Franziska could only see the high blue sky and the brave sunshine reflected in the vast glassy arch of the station and she linked arms with Doris and Louise, nervously terrified that she might get lost in the mêlée. She had never seen so many people together, a heaving excited crowd, men waving flags, women in high-built bonnets fluttered scented hankies, not to speak of the parade itself, a seemingly endless stream of soldiers in field grey. Their spiked helmets glinted as menacingly as their rifles, as if, Franziska thought, even their headgear was a weapon. The sun glanced on their polished, calf-length boots. Captured artillery pieces – from France, people said – were drawn by trucks, each one greeted with a deafening roar that almost drowned out the reedy pulse of brass and the shrill tremolo of penny whistles. The sheer spectacle of it, the noise and the crowds, the triumphant air, exhilarated Franziska; here, nameless in this raucous throng, she felt again the elusive whiff of anonymity. She was one more face in the crowd in a vast city in a huge empire. Here, at last, was the large world, she thought, the world she had imagined behind the thin horizon of home.

  Afterwards they strolled in the city. The leafy beer gardens and coffee houses on the Kurfürstendamm were packed with parade revellers. The floury, just-baked smell of pastries, the spicy tang of cinnamon and hot chocolate wafted from open windows and pavement tables as they passed. But they couldn’t have afforded to go into any of these places. When they scanned a menu posted in one of the restaurant windows, they discovered that dinner would knock them back seventy-six marks.

  ‘That’s more than we earn in a month,’ Louise said ruefully.

  Beside the menu, a notice from the war office urged – ‘Do not eat two dishes if one is enough.’ But even one would
have been too much for the Wingender girls. An hour of aimless wandering and they were back on the tram to Moabit, to the crowded blocks and smoking chimney stacks that was their city.

  It was a grey quarter, a grid of wide streets dotted with weekend landmarks. The public baths on Jonastraβe, where she and the Wingender girls went to bathe every Saturday morning. Armed with bars of soap and towels they lolled in the steaming baths, shouting over the wooden partitions of the green tiled cubicles until the hot water ran out and their fingerpads went white and rugged from the cold. There was the church on Oldenburgstraβe where Franziska went alone on Sundays (the Wingenders were not religious and Franziska only attended because she liked the familiar cadences of communal prayer and the dry touch of the wafer on her tongue). She no longer had access to the God of her childhood. Even if she had, He would surely be displeased with her. Instead she contemplated the pearly vastness of the church’s interior and felt emboldened by the distance she had travelled from His wrath. On Turmstraβe there were numerous beer cellars, many of them below ground, where she and Doris and Louise would venture on a Saturday night. They were infernos of noise, thanks to their low roofs and the crush of uniformed men, garrulous with war and ale, chanting and singing. Often it was too loud to talk or to be heard, though Doris invariably woke on a Sunday morning with a hoarse throat from trying. But Franziska was happy to sit in the smoky, raucous babble of a city desperately at play.

  HANS FRÖHLICH TOOK his evening meal with Frau Wingender and the girls. Frau Wingender presided over these meals with a motherly familiarity, particularly aimed at Herr Fröhlich. He got the best cuts of meat and always a second helping of vegetables. He showed no sign of the finicky appetite she had feared.

  ‘I always longed for a son,’ she told him, ‘but it was not to be. Now I have a gift of one, late in life!’

  ‘Not so late, Frau Wingender!’ Herr Fröhlich replied as she refilled his glass with beer.

  ‘Oh, you flatter, Herr Fröhlich,’ she replied, poking him merrily on the arm.

  Doris and Louise raised their eyes to heaven in unison.

  Franziska watched him covertly. His slender fingers, the untouched look of his skin. He had a boy’s face, pale and smooth, the only sharpness in his features was the severe line of his nose. She had to be circumspect with him; after her fainting fit both the Wingender sisters had ragged her unmercifully. Who fancies Hans, who fancies Hans, they would sing.

  ‘I do not fancy Herr Fröhlich,’ she replied angrily.

  ‘Herr Fröhlich,’ Doris cooed, ‘my, how formal we are.’

  Any time he directed a question at her – even to ask her to pass the butter or the beans – they would nudge one another knowingly.

  Under Frau Wingender’s pointed questioning, Herr Fröhlich described his days at the department store. He spent his time among trays of bobbins and threads, lengths of ribbon, cards of binding and edging.

  ‘So if you ladies would like anything in the line of trimmings, I may be of service.’

  Frau Wingender beamed munificently.

  He was lucky to be working for Tietz’s, he went on. His father – who was in tailoring – had managed to swing an apprenticeship for him at the company’s store in his native Düsseldorf. Then an opportunity for advancement had come up in Berlin; he might be in haberdashery now, but his plan was to become a buyer, and maybe eventually a manager.

  ‘My dream’, he said, ‘is to go to America, the New World. Oh, the opportunities there! I’m taking English classes so that I’ll be prepared.’

  ‘English?’ Doris all but shrieked. ‘What with the war and all?’

  ‘Commerce knows no boundaries, Fräulein Doris.’

  ‘I like to see ambition in a young man,’ Frau Wingender said approvingly.

  ‘Tell us about where you come from, Fräulein,’ Herr Fröhlich said to Franziska one evening as they sat over dinner. ‘I’ve never been to the east, though if this war continues I dare say I will get the chance.’

  ‘Where I come from?’ Franziska repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ he prompted.

  It was the first time since she had come to Berlin that anyone had asked her such a question. Frau Wingender, Doris and Louise had welcomed her into their world, but they had shown no interest in where she had come from. She sometimes thought that they considered Berlin the world and that she had simply emerged from some far-flung north-eastern suburb they had never heard of. But she was glad of their blithe acceptance, their total lack of curiosity.

  ‘You won’t have heard of it, it’s just a one-horse town. Not grand like Berlin …’

  ‘Grandness, Fräulein, is not everything.’

  ‘Just so,’ Frau Wingender said, eyeing Franziska reproachfully.

  ‘And Berlin can be a lonely place, I have found, when you’re far from home and not among your own.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Herr Fröhlich, you must give our beautiful city a chance. I’m sure my girls could …’

  ‘Mama!’ Doris said crossly. ‘Stop matchmaking.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she wheedled, ‘but I have to say Herr Fröhlich would be far more suitable than the company you’re presently keeping. She’s seeing a very uncouth young man, Herr Fröhlich, not steady and respectable like your good self.’

  ‘Mama, please,’ Doris said and standing up she flounced away from the table.

  Frau Wingender hurried after her with Louise in her wake.

  ‘Doris, Doris,’ Frau Wingender’s wail echoed down the deep stone stairwell outside, accompanied by the angry clatter of her daughter’s footsteps as she fled the building. Herr Fröhlich and Franziska were left facing each other across the strewn table.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘I seem to have set the cat among the pigeons.’

  He smiled apologetically and leaned forward, joining his hands together on Frau Wingender’s stained tablecloth.

  ‘I was wondering, Fräulein Schanzkowska,’ he started, ‘if I might be so bold as to ask you something?’

  Franziska dreaded what the next question would be.

  ‘Perhaps you would agree to step out with me one evening?’

  ‘Herr Fröhlich, Herr Fröhlich!’ Frau Wingender propelled herself into the room as if a large gust of wind was at her back, hands aflutter and blushing furiously.

  Herr Fröhlich retreated in his seat.

  ‘You must excuse Doris, she flies off the handle so easily. Takes after her father in that respect, I’m afraid.’

  She rummaged in a kitchen cupboard and produced a bottle of schnapps. She downed a large measure by the stove with her back to Herr Fröhlich.

  ‘Whereas I, as you know, am placid by nature.’

  She felt unworthy of him, Herr Hans Fröhlich. And she was ashamed of her own shame. Hadn’t her great-grandmother been a countess? She came from better stock than Herr Hans Fröhlich, a Jew, a tailor’s son from Düsseldorf. Apart from his gymnasium education and his department store deference, the only difference between them was that he was on his way up from tailoring and she was a step down from it. Living in lodgings, pushing bogies in a munitions plant. And how long would that last? The war would be over by Christmas. Hadn’t the kaiser himself said so? The soldiers would flood back from the Front. And who would need shells in peacetime? She pitched herself forward in time. She could be the wife of a store manager one day. She might end up in America, a bigger world than she had ever imagined. Whatever else might be said of Herr Fröhlich, he was going places. Desire did not come into it. Desire, she knew, could be murderous. Ambition, though, could harm no one.

  She kept Herr Fröhlich’s declaration of interest a secret from Doris and Louise. She was afraid that Doris would see through to her greed to better herself. And anyway she would only pester Franziska for every detail of the encounter. Perhaps it was the language, but Franziska had never managed to acquire the gossipy tone she had heard other girls use together in the factory when talking about young men. She could not even feign it. And there was no need
to say anything just yet, anyway. She had not given Herr Fröhlich an answer. Before she could she must find something new to wear. Nothing in her meagre wardrobe was good enough to step out in with Herr Fröhlich.

  She persuaded Doris to come shopping with her, not that Doris needed much persuasion. When they stepped off the tram, the two young women stepped into a burnished day of autumn. The sky was a drama of matted cloud moving swiftly across a fitful sun. They stood at the corner of a little park, appliquéd with gravel paths and bound by a row of plane trees. Berlin was unexpectedly full of such green spots, a soothing antidote to the stern reproach of stone façades and flinty brick. The light frowned and smiled on them, one minute gilded and bright, the next stormy and cross. There was a stall nearby where a man was roasting chestnuts in a large flat pan. The charred fumes infused the air and for a moment Franziska was transported. This was the smoky, violent smell of home.

  ‘Franziska?’ Doris was tugging at her sleeve.

  She started and swayed slightly, as if she had fallen into a pocket of trapped time.

  ‘I know,’ Doris said brightly, ‘let’s go to Tietz’s and see your fancy man in action.’

  ‘Doris, I’ve told you a million times …’

  ‘I know, you don’t fancy Herr Fröhlich. Well, then, what’s to stop us paying him a professional visit? We’re customers, after all, with money in our pockets, as good as any of his other ladies!’

  The Hermann Tietz department store drew crowds across the Alexanderplatz like a honeypot. Under the awnings curious bystanders gathered to gaze at its window displays, while streams of customers milled in its arcaded entrance. A revolving door, all heavy mahogany and milky glass, ushered Franziska and Doris in with the flourish of a florid dancing partner. Within there was an impression of polish and crimson. The lobby gave onto aisles of deep red carpet. A wide staircase beckoned.