The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Quick, quick,’ Herr Jünger urged, ‘or we shall miss the light.’

  He pointed at the louring sky visible through the attic window, tinged with the pale fire of a winter sunset.

  ‘Hans,’ she said, grabbing his arm, ‘if I’d known I could have worn something better than this.’ She tugged despondently at her black work skirt.

  ‘Oh, but we can dress up. That’s the whole point. Herr Jünger will give us costumes. We can be anyone we like.’

  ‘This is the theatre of life,’ Herr Jünger said importantly. He was a raffish-looking gent, straggly dark hair, an unkempt moustache and an artistic gait. He set to rearranging the furniture, pushing the chaise-longue to one side and centring the armchair and the cane table. Franziska rummaged through the open chest, swathes of chiffon skirts and stoles and boleros encrusted with tiny mirrored eyeholes.

  ‘That’s our gypsy collection,’ Herr Jünger hollered in mid-heave. ‘The society stuff is behind the screens at the other end of the room.’ He straightened, mopping his brow. ‘And you, sir, will go for uniform, no doubt. Most of our gentlemen do.’

  Franziska made for the far end of the room. Dipping behind the screens, she entered a bridal alcove. There, hanging from rows of pegs, was a sisterhood of dresses, ivory and cream, embossed satin, frothy lace, the filmy filigree of worked silk, the naked sheerness of netting. She fingered the hems and gingerly touched the sleeves and cuffs of the costumes, afraid at first to lift one down in case it might disintegrate in her hands. The drained and wintry half-light made them look like jostling ghosts. She savoured the sepulchral silence which seemed to sprout with presences, as if the owners of the clothes – for surely they had had owners once – had gathered in the gloom to watch and wait.

  ‘Hurry, Franziska,’ Hans called out to her.

  She riffled through the dresses again, inhaling the secretive musty scent that seeped from their whispering folds. What lives must have been lived in these! Finally she chose one, a full-length silk with a half-moon neckline around which a layered bed of net had been sewn. The three-quarter-length sleeves tapered into a deep cuff of broderie anglaise. Below the waist it flared into a full skirt. It, too, was covered with a fine netting and here and there a tiny pearl-like bead had been sewn on, as if the dress were the exquisitely delicate haul of a miniature fisher god. She stepped out from behind the screen.

  ‘Ah, the Tatiana,’ Herr Jünger said, hand on hip. ‘Modelled on a Romanov gown, made for one of the grand duchesses.’

  ‘My God, Franziska,’ Hans gasped, ‘look at you! Transformed!’

  He stood at the far end of the room, resplendent in a naval uniform, stiff collar and cravat, all sombre blue and gold, bright as a new coin. She saw the blood-red drape behind him and for a moment her vision of him faltered.

  ‘Come, come, darling,’ Herr Jünger said, steering her towards the podium where Hans was standing.

  Herr Jünger settled her on the stiff chair while he tamped down the tufts of net which sprang up on her bosom and lap. Hans stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other clasping a crested cap to his coined chest. Herr Jünger retreated a few steps to get a picture of them in his head, as he said, then he leaped nimbly off the platform and returned to the large hooded camera which stood on a tripod some distance away.

  ‘Just lovely,’ he cooed from behind the hood. ‘Just hold that. And smile, if you will!’

  He held up what appeared to be a smoking gun, which turned into a blue explosion.

  Startled, Franziska moved.

  ‘Oh no,’ she groaned. Her face would be reduced to a blur in the finished product.

  Herr Jünger rushed to reassure.

  ‘No, no, darling, it will be just perfect. Framed, Herr Fröhlich?’

  ‘Yes, why not! We can put it on our mantel and show our grandchildren.’

  ‘Herr and Frau Fröhlich,’ Herr Jünger declaimed, licking the lead of his pencil before jotting down their names in a notebook he had fished from his pocket. ‘Come by next Saturday and all will be revealed.’

  But it was an appointment they would never keep.

  Franziska had thought soldiers would come to the door, that a general in a peaked cap would point a finger at Hans, as if he had done something wrong that he must be punished for and he would be dragged away. Instead his call came in the form of a letter, a letter from his mother. Dated 15 February 1916. His papers had arrived at home, to the rooms above the tailor’s shop. For Ernst and Wolfgang too, she wrote. The ink was smudged where she’d paused to cry. He must present himself in Düsseldorf a week hence for training. Frau Wingender was distraught – where was she going to find another lodger if all the young men were being ordered to the Front? Doris bustled her away, leaving Franziska and Hans stranded in his room, his mother’s letter passing back and forth between them, a page at a time.

  ‘You’re young and strong, you’ll survive,’ she said brightly. But she did not believe her own words. ‘The war can’t last for ever. It will be over soon.’

  ‘We were saying that a year ago,’ he said glumly. He stood like a frightened boy, already at a distance, lost in his own fear.

  ‘Maybe there’ll be an armistice,’ she ventured.

  ‘Oh Franziska, no false hope, please.’ He turned away.

  ‘You must live then, if not for yourself, for me,’ she urged.

  ‘All our plans, our dreams,’ he said, ‘going up in smoke.’

  She nestled into his back, her head between the slender bony wings of his shoulder blades.

  ‘Let’s pretend then’, she whispered, ‘that you are going on a trip. A civilian on a journey. Home to see your mother. It’s true, isn’t it?’

  He laughed grimly.

  ‘There is no war here,’ she said emphatically.

  The evening light faded into a violent sunset, staining the dim room red. A flock of starlings wheeled outside the window, then fell like smuts of coal dust in the air. Darkness settled on them, standing clasped together, her arms wound around him, her hand on his heart. She thought if they didn’t move they could hold this moment, stop the clock, halt the drumbeat of time. But finally he undid her hold and turning around he buried his head in the crook of her neck. His lips brushed the lobe of her ear, the downturn of her eyelids. She trained his fingers down the buttons of her blouse, then guided him along the intricate stays of her bodice until with a gasp his frightened skin met the cold globe of her breast. She offered it to him and felt a latching tug as his lips sucked the fleshy bullet of her nipple. They stumbled to the bed, the boy child at her breast, burrowing fiercely with his tongue and fingers as she parted her skirts and eased the rough cotton of her drawers down around her hips as she led him carefully in.

  ‘There,’ she breathed as he took stealthy occupation, releasing a joyous, baffled whimper. He had entered her, but she possessed him now; there was no way she could lose him.

  She comforted him, soothing his half-delighted shudders. They lay for hours in the complicit night, as if they had coupled in the darkness of time’s beginning.

  ‘Franziska,’ he asked hoarsely, as if her name was a question in itself.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, as if it were another.

  ‘Marry me?’

  She moved into Hans’s room. Frau Wingender was appeased. For her it meant that Hans’s going was not a complete loss. For Franziska it meant getting away from the smothering intimacy of the Wingender sisters, Louise’s doe-eyed empathy, Doris’s pert unconcern. She hibernated there even though spring was budding in the trees outside. Hans had left his greatcoat in the wardrobe and she would sleep with it thrown over her so she could be enveloped with the smell of him – soap and candle tallow and semen. That was all she had left of her fiancé. No ring to wear, just the whispered endearment of a frightened boy which had to stretch across half a continent now, away to the west somewhere. She could not speak of it for fear she had imagined he had asked her to marry him and because of the niggling shame over how hi
s promise had been made. Doris, for all her flighty gaiety, was proper with it. And if Frau Wingender discovered what had been done under her roof Franziska would find herself on the street.

  Doris chided her for moping.

  ‘Plenty of other fish in the sea,’ she declared, linking arms with Franziska on the way home from the factory some weeks after Hans’s departure.

  ‘I don’t want anyone else,’ Franziska replied.

  ‘Leave her be, Dor,’ Louise interjected. ‘Hans and Franziska were made for each other. He will come home safe and they’ll get married. Isn’t that right, Franziska?’

  She was grateful to Louise for her stout defence, but she felt she had moved beyond the simple fellowship of the Wingender sisters. Her life was no longer here with them, it was out there on the Western Front with her boy soldier. The newspaper headlines screamed – ‘City of Verdun in Flames’ – and suddenly it concerned her.

  Frau Wingender was clattering pots in the kitchen and complaining loudly. She had spent the day doing battle at the market, which always left her short-tempered and cranky. Food was getting scarcer; yesterday for their evening meal there had been just potatoes with a scattering of salt. Famine fare, Frau Wingender called it. Today there was a cabbage broth and a knuckle bone of pork wheedled from the butcher’s stall.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Franziska, ‘it’s nothing but gristle and the whiff of flesh.’

  Franziska’s stomach turned at the sight of the raw joint. She felt suddenly squeamish.

  ‘Any letters?’ she asked urgently.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear,’ Frau Wingender said vaguely as if post arrived every day at the household. ‘Something did come for you.’

  Franziska dashed into Hans’s room – both she and the Wingenders still referred to it as Hans’s room. There on the bed the letter lay like a small encapsulation of Hans, a white oblong sliver of him. She lay down and clutching the letter to her breast she sniffed the envelope, hoping she could catch something of him from it. But it had passed through too many hands. It was rain-spattered – was this the mud of Verdun, she wondered, here beneath her fingertips? – and the address had begun to weep. She tried to imagine the letter’s journey from the muddied battlefield, nestling in a sack on a truck, rattling through the night on a train, and sorted by a careless hand before it found its way to her. How delicate and defenceless their connection was. She pressed her lips to the seal before tearing the letter open with impatient fingers.

  My dearest Franziska,

  Oh, how suddenly everything has changed. How I lived and loved is now like a dream. A passing mood. Only one thing is real now – the war! I should like to dream about you, and to love you, but I have not time for you now. I am entirely occupied with thoughts of war and suffering. Around us hell has been unchained. The attack was terrible. Our artillery kept up a barrage and after two hours the position was sufficiently prepared for our infantry. It was magnificent the way our men advanced. In the face of appalling machine-gun fire they went on with a confidence which nobody could ever attempt to equal. And so the hill which had been stormed in vain three times was taken in an hour. But now comes the worst part – to hold the hill. Bad days are ahead. The French guns are shooting appallingly and every night there are counter-attacks and bombing raids. Where I am, we are only about a couple of metres apart. We could be torn to bits at any moment by a shell in the trench, covered in dirt, and so end – in the mud and the filth. We are comrades here, but only in this, as candidates for death. The stench of death is everywhere. There is never silence. Even when the guns are not roaring there are strange howls in the night. The wounded cry out, but there is nothing to quell their pain. Even the healthy – several lines were blacked out here, the censor’s pen made them indecipherable – have nightmares in the midst of nightmare. They call out to their loved ones, their sweethearts as I do to you, Franziska, my love.

  Yours, as always,

  Hans

  SHE READ THE letter over and over again. It was as if it were from a stranger. Apart from the endearment at the end it might as well have been. She was angry with him, his letter like a report from some other world, as if he were already dead, passed into some cruel hell. Judged and damned. But what crime was Hans guilty of to merit such punishment? Had he murdered somebody? Even if he hadn’t he would return a killer, a man who had taken life to save his own. The boy Hans was gone. She shook herself. Hans was not dead. Here was his handwriting. But where was his voice? She could not hear it, no matter how hard she read between the lines. Is this what war did to men? Made them disappear before they were dead? She hid the letter under the floorboards. She buried it in the hope that its nightmarish echoes might die away too. She hung Hans’s coat in the wardrobe and shut the door on him. It no longer bore his smell; it too had turned malevolent. She could only get the whiff of blood and gunpowder from it now.

  The punch clock in the Shifting House marked time for her, snapping her card between its metal lips, wheezing out the hours. She worked as if in a dream, numbed by a strange kind of bereavement as if she were already a war widow. Was this what had afflicted her mother, this glassy remoteness, an unshed grief? In her new decoupled state, she found her thoughts returning to home, but she could not quite conjure it up any more. The war kept on getting in the way. Home seemed as strange and dangerous to her now as Hans’s muddied battlefield and sodden trenches.

  Suddenly, the factory began to make her sick. The fumy smell of braziers, the heaving labour, the oily clangour of shells, the dry din of the machines, the fiery showers of sparks from the whingeing lathes. She could not eat in the mornings. The black bread made her retch; her stomach heaved at the smell of the coffee which Frau Wingender had managed to get despite the shortages.

  ‘See!’ she said, pouring for Franziska, ‘see how I look after my girls.’

  Franziska covered her mouth to stop the bile rising. She tried to hide her queasiness at work. Twice in one week her pay had been docked – once for taking an unscheduled lavatory break, another for leaving the trolley shed before the meal hooter.

  ‘Plenty of young women out there who are hungry for work,’ Herr Lindner had warned her.

  If he knew she was ailing, he would have no mercy, she knew.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ Franziska confided in Louise as they undressed in the Shifting House. ‘Every morning I feel like this. Like death.’ Louise gave her an odd look. ‘The work is making me ill.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s all it is?’ Louise asked.

  ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘Oh Franziska, you’re not pregnant, are you?’ Louise shook her arm vehemently. ‘Are you late?’

  Franziska said nothing.

  ‘How late are you?’

  Franziska didn’t know. It could be a week, it could be three. She didn’t keep track. She was bled; it was something done to her. If she didn’t bleed, she didn’t worry. In fact she was glad of it. Her life’s blood every month, lost. Taken from her so she could never really be strong.

  ‘Franziska, how late are you?’

  She was not pregnant. She couldn’t be. She had wished for the bleeding to stop and it had. Franziska knew the power of wishes. It was the men who were bleeding now. This is what happened during wars. The men bled and the women stopped.

  ‘Hans is gone nearly two months, Franziska.’

  ‘Hans has never touched me, do you hear?’

  The room fell silent. Girls in their bloomers looked around curiously at the two of them, clutching one another angrily in the middle of the room. Tempers often flared in the locker rooms. The early hour, the long war, mothers leaving fractious children behind in the gunmetal dawn, husbands missing in action. A dropped hairclip, hanging a coat on the wrong hook could ignite the tinder box. Franziska lowered her voice.

  ‘He’s not that kind of boy. Maybe the kind you and your sister hang around with, but not my Hans. Not my Hans!’

  The Lady Superintendent parted the two gir
ls.

  ‘Number 670, what’s all this about? I’m putting you on warning!’

  Louise sloped away, shaking her head.

  ‘She’s crazy, Auntie, really crazy,’ she muttered under her breath.

  ‘My, but you’re getting plump,’ Frau Wingender said to her that evening as she picked at her meagre dinner. Louise shot her a recriminatory glance across the table. They had not spoken since the morning’s argument.

  ‘Here’s my girls going to skin and bone.’

  She plucked at Doris’s dimpled forearm.

  ‘But you, Franziska, dear, are blooming.’ Frau Wingender smiled sweetly, but appraisingly. ‘I think it must be love.’

  Had Louise told her something?

  ‘Anyone would think you were pregnant,’ Doris said chirpily.

  ‘I am not pregnant, Doris Wingender, do you hear?’ She rose from the table, her fist in the air. ‘What have you been saying, Louise?’

  ‘Nothing, Franziska, honestly, nothing!’

  ‘Girls, girls, let’s have no squabbling. Sit, Franziska, and finish your meal. I’m sure our Doris meant no harm. We all know what a gentleman Hans Fröhlich was, is,’ she corrected herself. ‘Didn’t he give me his word!’

  Franziska sat down, suddenly defeated. She was trapped; there was no way out.

  Louise cornered her in the hallway.

  ‘Listen, Franziska, if you’re in trouble, there’s always Fräulein Hackerl.’

  Franziska laughed. What had the henpecked seamstress got to do with this? She had paid off her last instalment on the dress weeks ago.

  ‘To make me new clothes?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Hush, Franziska, not so loud. Mama doesn’t know.’