The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  She steered her down the stairs to the next turn, where they whispered in the darkness.

  ‘Doesn’t know what?’

  ‘Franziska, please, listen to me. Fräulein Hackerl is not just a seamstress; she can …’ Louise sighed, then started again. ‘Remember Mathilde Bender? From the cartridge factory?’

  Franziska did remember her, a small, broad-beamed girl with a turned eye.

  ‘She was going to have a baby and we, Doris and I, told her about Fräulein Hackerl. She had to pay, of course.’

  Franziska looked at her blankly.

  ‘Pay?’

  ‘To have it, the baby … removed,’ Louise said carefully.

  ‘Removed?’

  No, it couldn’t be.

  ‘It’ll be too late if you don’t do something about it soon, Franziska. You’ll begin to show.’

  ‘No,’ Franziska cried and clapped her hands over her ears. ‘No, it cannot be!’

  I know you, Elsbetha Hackerl, secret killer of babies. Maker of dresses the colour of clotted blood. Impostor with your brown, earnest gaze and those slender capable hands, all kind words and reassurance. Silken-tongued. Passing yourself off in the suit of a seamstress. I know you. Pincushion for a breast. Wielder of scissors and knife. Do you use them when you ply your trade in the dark hours of the night, your secret trade? I know you, Elsbetha Hackerl. Midwife of death. Creeping up on the innocent, on the barely formed, yanking them from their safe, watery homes and throttling them until they drown in their own blood. I know you.

  They will come back to haunt you. The unhappily dead. The cries of those you have extinguished will cry out in the night. They will have their passage into the world that you have denied them. They will insist on it. One day you will open a door and unwittingly let them in. There is nowhere to hide from the murder in your heart.

  ‘Franziska?’ Louise was shaking her as if she had fallen into a faint. ‘You must do something, or your life will be ruined.’

  The next morning Franziska volunteered for the Danger Building.

  She worked on the monkey machine, which forced a mixture of amatol and TNT down into the waiting shell cases. It took four girls using all their might to haul on a rope which raised the beater, a massive stone weight. Then, at a signal from the monitor, they let it drop onto the powdered mixture until it was packed tight. It was tense work, but at least there was peace there. Gowned to the throat, with fireproof hats and masks, they couldn’t talk to one another even if they had wanted to. They communicated by gestures, a dumbshow. Their task demanded the utmost concentration. The slightest error could cause a conflagration. Franziska was glad of the quiet after the clatter and roar of the trolley work and the idle chatter of the Poznan twins. There was something soothing about the deathly silence.

  Another letter came from Hans. She did not open it. She hid it with the first one underneath the floorboards.

  ON A BRIGHT May morning, billowy with cloud, Frau Wingender decided to spring-clean. She opened the window in Hans’s room and threw the carpet over the sill to give it a good beating. Little flurries of powdery dust escaped into the blue buzzing air, making her sneeze. She was leaning out to retrieve the rug when she saw the figure of a woman halting at the entrance on the street below through a haze of flying fleck and spittle. From this angle all she could see was the woman’s bare head and the rounded slope of her shoulders. She was carrying a shopping bag, too heavy for her, and it canted her over to one side as she parked her bicycle at the kerb below. Seeing Frau Wingender peering out, she shouted up.

  ‘Frau Wingender?’

  It was Frau Goldberg. Now what did she want, Frau Wingender thought irritably to herself, just when she was in the middle of housework. Frau Wingender waved and withdrew. Wiping her hands on her apron she made her way downstairs, leaving the room dancing with disturbed dust. She had no feeling of premonition. What everyone feared was the telegram boy. And by the time she had gained the courtyard she had convinced herself that Frau Goldberg was going to put more business her way.

  ‘Frau Goldberg,’ Frau Wingender said, smiling broadly. ‘Come to send me another lodger! Another nice boy like Hans Fröhlich, I hope.’

  Frau Goldberg’s face suddenly crumpled. She dropped her provisions and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Frau Goldberg, what is it?’

  ‘Oh, Frau Wingender,’ she wailed, ‘forgive me.’

  ‘What is it?’ Rosa Wingender felt the first pangs of alarm.

  ‘It’s Hans Fröhlich,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a letter from his mother. The poor boy is …’

  ‘Dead?’

  Frau Goldberg nodded miserably.

  Trailing the feather duster behind her, she climbed the stairs and sat in the kitchen. Her manic energy for housekeeping had deserted her. She sat in a vague kind of stupor for almost an hour, at a loss as to what to do. She should really go to the factory. She could make it in time for the girls’ lunch hour, get Franziska called to the gate, prepare her, somehow, for the bad news. The very fact of Frau Wingender turning up unannounced like that would be warning enough. Franziska would know immediately. But Rosa Wingender did not have the courage, despite opening a bottle of schnapps and downing two or three measures in quick succession. Better to leave the poor girl in ignorance; she would know soon enough. After several hours she went back into Hans’s room; as if to convince herself he was really gone. She opened the wardrobe idly and found his overcoat. She felt tears well up at the thought of the young shoulders that would never fill it out again. Beside it was Franziska’s dress, the one she’d had made by Fräulein Hackerl. The sight of their courting clothes made Rosa smart with recognition. Suddenly she knew. The girl was pregnant. That would explain the bickering with Doris and Louise, her strange, volatile moods. She lifted the dress out. It was only then she noticed that the dress had been ripped at the bodice and skirt, as if someone had taken a knife to it deliberately. For the second time in one day Frau Wingender was shocked.

  ‘Is that you, Franziska?’ she called out when she heard the footsteps of the girls on the stairs outside.

  Franziska felt a sharp pang of dread. It was probably another letter. She could not bear another missive of despair which would have to be opened under the watchful gaze of the Wingenders. Louise, in particular, was weighing on her, pressing her unwanted tender counsel upon her, accompanied by an expression of doomed worry. She it was who had checked the casualty lists on Potsdamer Platz, seeking out Hans’s name, until the authorities halted the practice; Franziska had superstitiously kept away. She did not want to see his name among the numbered thousands. The war did not own her or Hans; she would not let it. She ducked into her room.

  ‘Franziska?’ Frau Wingender’s voice came from the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, tense with a day’s waiting and the dread of being the bearer of such news.

  Doris threw herself into a chair dejectedly. Louise, noting the bottle of schnapps on the table, put some water on to boil.

  ‘She’s got another letter, I suppose,’ Doris complained. ‘I should be so lucky. My Fritzie hasn’t written once.’

  Fritz Schnaller had at last won his place at the Front.

  ‘Hush there, Doris,’ Frau Wingender snapped, ‘you have nothing to complain about. Think of poor Franziska.’

  Her hand flew to her mouth and she hurriedly filled her glass again. Louise noticed the absence of the usual indulgent tone her mother employed with Doris.

  ‘What do you mean, Mama?’ Louise asked.

  Rosa Wingender rose and left the kitchen. Louise made to follow her, but her mother shook her head and beckoned her to go back. The sisters, Louise frozen by the door, Doris sitting, suddenly alert, braced themselves. A few moments later they heard a sharp wail, like the strangled cry of a child. Louise rushed into Hans’s room to find Franziska on her knees, her hand clutching the metal lip of the fireplace.

  ‘Is it Hans?’ she asked her mother, though she already knew.

  ‘Drowne
d,’ Franziska said.

  ‘What?’ Louise was convinced she had misheard. Doris brushed by her and hoisted the stricken Franziska up from the floor. She led her to the bed.

  ‘Poor Hans,’ Doris murmured over and over again. ‘Poor, poor Hans.’

  Franziska felt only a queer numbness and the oddest sensation in the pit of her stomach, dread giving way to relief. The awful tension of waiting was over. The Wingenders were only catching up with what she had known all along. Hans had been doomed. Not because of the war but because of her, Franziska Schanzkowksa; she had given him the kiss of death.

  Frau Wingender hovered guiltily while her two girls ministered to Franziska, who sat pale and silent. Franziska read her distance as judgement.

  ‘We were engaged, Frau Wingender,’ she said defiantly.

  Something in the girl’s tone made Frau Wingender angry despite herself.

  ‘Where’s the ring then?’

  Franziska did not reply.

  ‘In your belly, that’s where,’ the landlady snapped. ‘And the Fröhlichs won’t want to hear from a girl like you.’

  ‘Mama, please, not now,’ Louise pleaded.

  ‘Maybe, under the circumstances, they’d be glad to know they had a grandchild,’ Doris offered.

  ‘I doubt it very much,’ Frau Wingender replied. ‘A Polish brat?’

  Franziska tried to imagine Hans’s parents, but the picture of them which Hans had so lovingly painted was obliterated. They were Jews. She remembered what her father had said about Jews. ‘Moneylenders, living off the back of us Poles, worse than the Germans. They stick to their own kind.’ She could never have married Hans; it had all been a ruinous fantasy. There was no way now that she could escape from who she was. A stupid Polack, pregnant and alone.

  She rose the next morning as usual. Her sleep, such as it was, had been tormented. Whenever she drifted into slumber the shadows seemed to come alive and she would wake with a start, imagining the wardrobe with its door ajar like an upstanding coffin. The empty grate seemed to roar silently. The carpet left draped over the sill was a dark wave about to inundate the room through the open window. Awake in the dewy dawn she heard faintly from above the rattle of Fräulein Hackerl’s treadle machine and almost at the same time she could have sworn the child moved within her.

  ‘Franziska, dear,’ Frau Wingender said when she saw the girl, pale and hollow-eyed at the stove, ‘you can’t go to work, not today.’

  Chastened by her drunken excess of the night before, she had reverted to extravagant mothering. ‘Doris will explain to Herr Lindner, won’t you, Dor?’

  Doris edged round the table and placed a hand tentatively on Franziska’s shoulder.

  ‘I shall tell them that your fiancé …’ She faltered. ‘That you have lost your fiancé.’ Overnight, Hans had gained a title, her fiancé.

  ‘They always give compassionate leave in cases like this.’

  Cases like this. She had been reduced to a case, a casualty of war.

  ‘No, Frau Wingender, I must go to work. I want to go. What would I do here?’

  ‘But, my dear, you’ve had a terrible shock,’ Frau Wingender danced from foot to foot, wringing her hands in her soiled apron.

  ‘I’m better off at work. It will take my mind off everything.’

  ‘Are you sure, Franziska?’ Louise circled round the other side of her. ‘In your condition?’

  A case with a condition.

  She did not want their pawing sympathy. It made her feel wanly delicate like a shard of eggshell.

  ‘Not a word,’ she warned Louise as they entered the factory yard.

  She did not want to hear whispers rippling behind her on the factory floor. Franziska has lost her fiancé. And is big with his child. Even her predicament was common.

  ‘Late again, 670,’ Herr Lindner barked as she hurried towards the Shifting House to the plangent mewl of the klaxon.

  ‘Tell him,’ Doris urged.

  ‘You’re on your last chance, do you hear?’

  ‘But sir!’ Doris objected.

  ‘No buts, 459. We can’t afford slackers here.’

  Last chance. The words echoed in her head. The iron clangour of machinery took up the chorus like train wheels singing a distant, impossible destination. She undressed hurriedly and donned her gown and hat, gagging herself with her cloth mask as she passed through the partition to the clean side. She followed the snake of girls making their way down the corridor to the Danger Building.

  ‘Hurry, hurry, girls,’ she could hear the Lady Superintendent urge other latecomers, ‘there’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  The silence of the Danger Building was like a balm; here all was quiet, under control, the trestle tables with their trays of trotyl, the girls masked to hide their liverish-coloured skin, the roots of their hair gone ginger from the suffocating powder. Bea Bratzl was already at work at the head of the table, weighing out the powder on a pair of scales, while either side the girls were filling bags. Franziska made her way to the monkey machine, joining the girls hauling on the rope to bring down the beater. They took it in turns – once on the beater, once holding the shell case in place so the powder would be firmly packed, once as the monitor giving the signal for the beater to drop. All morning they worked, the numbing thud of the beater rising and falling. The only noise was the distant rumble of the machines, their fiery spit and whine, as they pounded and packed. Just before lunch, Herr Lindner appeared with his clipboard and prowled around the tables. He was checking up on her, Franziska was sure. He stood behind her, so close she could hear his habitual dispproving sniffle.

  ‘Dawdling again, 670,’ he said.

  She turned hurriedly to Bea Bratzl and surreptitiously gave the signal for the beater to be lowered in the hope that she could escape further admonishment. But as she did something caught his eye – she would never know what – and as she stepped back and the beater was coming down, he leaned forward and she was blinded by the fiery dazzle of his spectacles. She saw his flinty face change, melting into terror, the fright of death, the awful banality of his flailing hands and the pink insides of his mouth and then the whole building shook, a ghastly fire-red roar and a ball of flame engulfed him. Something soft and bloody spattered her, a piece of his flesh, and then the blessed darkness came. Oblivion.

  It was only a few moments of darkness but it changed everything. Franziska would often wonder what had happened in that lost trapdoor of time like a gaping hole in her eggshell universe. It was as if she had been born again in a fury of blood and fire. When she came to, it was to a choking spectral devastation as if colour had been drained from the world, the building reduced to a floury rubble, a charred smell in her nostrils, her lungs clogged with a gritty dust. In her ears the frantic breathy yelp of an alarm. She was on the ground, prone, her cheek crushed against a hand, not her own, the magnificently intact hand of a man, the only recognisable part of a bloodied, scorched mound beside her. When she tried to speak her lips burned. The faces of women peered over her, large and overblown, mouthing at her, but she could not make out what they were saying. Apart from the panicky shrill of the hooter everything else was silent.

  One face swims into view, a young woman’s, brown eyes, long hair in plaits swinging at her shoulders.

  ‘Franziska, Franziska,’ she is saying, ‘are you all right? Can you hear me?’

  She wants to drift away from this insistent voice speaking in code, calling this name, adrift and meaningless in the choking dust and charred flesh.

  ‘It’s Louise, can you hear me?’ the girl keeps on saying, lightly tapping her on the cheek every time she closes her eyes to ease her burning lids. Her eyeballs are aflame.

  ‘Sissy,’ the voice says and the sky turns blue, a rectangle of cornflower blue, a bed of gold beneath her.

  ‘Sissy,’ the voice calls again. ‘Sissy!’

  A hand grasps hers. It feels cold on her searing skin. Then there is another rupture. She is lifted and swung
like a turkey carcass onto a canvas hammock. A bumpy journey. Her nerve ends scream. She feels the rough brush of women’s skirts against her cheeks. Mother! But when she looks up all she can see are the menacing gallows of blackened machines. A rush of cool air hits her crackled face. They are outside now, footsteps cracking on bulbous cobbles. Then she is hoisted into a dim metal capsule, an engine coughs and revs, and a terrible juddering starts as if they have placed her on an assembly line, a pale green egg in a sea of field-grey grenades. Then with the flick of a switch the movement stops, the engine throb subsides with a throaty growl. A cymbal clap, a pair of metal doors swing open and she hears the swift tattoo of footsteps again. The lazy clop of horse’s hooves. Papa! They are travelling down a long corridor, light like the sick colour of parchment, an air of hushed urgency. They pass white ghosts with shoes that make no sound. On they run. She can hear the heavy breaths of her bearers, messengers with bad news, dodging the explosions, the angry spat of gunfire. And then, suddenly, the flurry ceases. She has reached the benediction of a white room. She returns to the easeful dark.

  FOR WEEKS SHE drifted, pain her only clock. It ticked slowly, biding its time before rising to a booming crescendo on the hour. She would come to, the light a jagged mosaic. She was swaddled in white, a corset of pain at her waist and temples, her left foot strapped tightly, her hands paws of gauze. She tried to shield her eyes from the piercing sun-dazzle, but her arms were too heavy. Protest reared up in her throat. At first no sound would come, then only a breathy rasp. The first time she howled it startled her; she did not know where the sound had come from. She lay silent and tense in case the noise, her noise, would bring the building crashing down around her. Everything was imminent with danger. Edges hurt. The corner of the locker beside the bed was sharp as a bayonet blade; the fat bulb of a white enamel jug seemed to pulse. The curved end of the iron bedstead pressed against her imprisoned feet. White screens billowed around her. Mooned faces emerged from their folds with a whisper of starch and a tinny crash of metal. Disembodied hands tended her, pushing her gently back into the deep.