The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  Neuruppin Asylum had none of the white order of the Charity Hospital. It was as loud as the factory, except here the noises were human, not industrial, outside and not inside her head. High, piercing shrieks, the low moans of the mad. Franziska was wearing the red dress when she was frogmarched into the hospital between two orderlies in white coats, who had collected her from the Wingenders. She had not protested; she was glad of the movement, a trip in a motor. Doris and Louise waved from the windows above as she was taken away, as if she were going on a jaunt to the Wannsee. Frau Wingender planted a moist kiss on her cheek.

  ‘It’s for your own good, my dear,’ she whispered.

  Franziska looked forward to the destination. Sea air, the flap of bunting, the lap of water. When she found herself alone in a soft, silent cell, wearing a striped uniform of rough ticking and her hands strangely straddled behind her back, she was not alarmed. Through the high, barred window she could see a scudding blue sky, a budding branch. A nurse brought her meals on a tray and fed them to her as if she were a delicate baby. Spoon by spoon. And it was real food. Some potato, even a little meat, one morning a beheaded boiled egg. She had not had an egg in months; the gelid yolk, the slippery white tasted like nectar. Indeed, Frau Wingender was right; it was doing her good. She felt a great calm descend, the hours passing in blameless idleness, sitting trussed in her bandaged room. Everything inside her was dead and laid to rest. She did not speak since there was no one to speak to. No one addressed her by her name. She found it soothing, this mute kingdom in which she ruled. Memories started to sink; she had difficulty sometimes remembering that there had been a life before – the apartment, the factory, even Hans seemed like some fevered manifestation of her own lonely yearning. Weeks went by. Asylum time was deceptively elongated, it did not gag and halt as ordinary time did, it was steady and pensive, sacred as an empty church. One morning – at least she thought it was morning judging by the brave light flooding the cell – two stout nurses entered her lair and cornered her. Gingerly they approached, making hushing sounds as if she were an unbroken horse in a narrow stall. They removed the strange harness they had put her in and backed away fearfully when she was liberated, as if she might bray and whinny at them. Some days later a doctor came. She saw him spy through the barred porthole in the door before entering. As he stepped inside, a flood of noise accompanied him, the metallic clangour of other doors locking shut, the rowdy babble of the wards. He stood at a distance, a foxy-haired man with a grey-flecked beard, which he stroked pensively with his eyes downcast. He began to pace up and down as if he too were confined, while she sat on the low, hard cot and counted his footsteps. He was a burly man, but graceful with it, and his stride was generous so he covered the distance from wall to wall in four steps, whereas it took her seven. That was how she had kept time. Finally he cleared his throat.

  ‘Fräulein Wingender,’ he started.

  For a minute, baffled, she looked around wondering if somehow Doris or Louise had slipped into the room behind him, but there was no sign of either of the Wingender girls. Had time suddenly speeded up? Was she already released from her feathered nest and back again in the apartment on Beulestraße? She made to speak, but he raised his hand like a policeman.

  ‘Since your mother committed you, we feel you have made much progress. We believe, further, that you are no longer a danger to yourself, or others, as you were when you came to us.’

  He paused and she tried to voice her protest again, to tell him who she really was, but he raised his monitor’s hand. She wondered how the confusion had started and why this man thought Frau Wingender was her mother.

  ‘We find’, he said, sighing grandly, ‘that the rest cure is the best thing for war strain.’

  ‘I am not Fräulein Wingender,’ Franziska said loudly before he could proceed. ‘There’s been some mistake …’

  ‘Now, Fräulein, let’s not ruin our chances of recuperation by any silly talk,’ the doctor countered swiftly. ‘We have enough people in here who have notions about who they are. Besides, your mother is to come tomorrow to sign your release papers. We don’t want to have to send her away disappointed, now do we?’

  Franziska shook her head silently. What did it matter who she was, or who he thought she was. And Frau Wingender was as close to a mother as she had now, she who had once had two. So she buttoned her lip and smiled sweetly.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ the doctor said, offering his own oily beam. ‘Silence pays in here.’

  She was to return to Neuruppin twice that year, and once in early 1918 to the asylum at Schöneberg. Each time Frau Wingender signed her in as her daughter – it was the only way she could have her committed. They were short stays and always followed the same pattern. The drumming ache in her head would become a dull roar. The tinselly shiver of tissue paper or the distant barking of a shut-up dog would set up a throbbing in the wound behind her ear. In her feet she could feel the painful thrum of the trams rumbling in the darkened streets down below. Her limbs were like a barometer, predicting the stealthy change in her interior climate. Then the nightmares would start. Fire and water. A river where the bodies of the dead might rise up to the surface at any moment. She would stare into the water and find not her own reflection but a child’s staring up at her. Damp curls and baby teeth. Or she would be lying in a trench where soldiers scrambled trying to get a foothold as the mud walls slithered and seeped with blood. Then a blinding flash and always fire …

  Returning to the Wingenders was like going back to the Front.

  ‘Imagine, the tsar of Russia has fallen!’ Doris informed her triumphantly after her first time in Neuruppin. ‘His captors have him chopping wood.’

  Fritz was home, invalided out, which helped Doris’s good humour.

  ‘I feel sorry for the tsar,’ Louise said, ‘bad enough that we have to go without. We’re used to it. But royalty are different.’

  ‘It’s good news for Germany, Fritz says,’ Doris said. ‘At least we’re not fighting on two Fronts.’

  The second time she was admitted there was the great workers’ strike. Doris and Louise had joined thousands of workers who had dropped tools and marched on the Alexanderplatz.

  ‘Oh Franziska, you should have seen it,’ Louise said, eyes shining. ‘So many people all together. Until the police moved in. I nearly got struck by a baton myself.’

  The third time Franziska was released, she came home to defeat.

  THE CITY AWOKE, alive suddenly with dislocated wraiths – soldiers, stragglers, beggars, the unemployed. They emerged as if out of the dark underground, stumbling dazed onto the streets, idle and hungry. There had been a revolution, the kaiser driven out, but apart from bands of soldiers wearing red armbands who roamed raggedly about bragging triumphantly and the daily snowstorm of flyers falling from the roaring wings of planes overhead, Franziska saw little sign of it. For her and the Wingenders there was only defeat. It hung over the city like a smothering cloud. It even had a taste, sour and metallic like blood in the teeth. The streets were full with crowds venting their anger with old war cries, as if the thirst for blood had entered their veins. Protest was their only work. Doris and Louise had been laid off. The smoke-stacks and warehouses around Moabit lay idle, the stores opened but with as little to sell as before – rotten cabbage, handfuls of pocked potatoes, stringy bread.

  In the spring Franziska found a job in the fields, sowing turnips. It was an hour’s walk from where the train set her down to get there, followed by a day of back-breaking labour. All that year she slaved, bent over double in the ragged fields, despising the work, though she was glad of the couple of marks it yielded. She would pick bunches of wild chives or radishes and chew on them as she worked, their sour taste as pungent as the defeat all around her. They left green stains on her teeth, which rattled loosely in her head. She was permanently hungry, something which her illness had up to this protected her from. This sudden return of appetite tormented her. She fantasised about meat, memorising
the succulent pork of her childhood, the pulpy texture of it, soft and yielding, and particularly the crescent of translucent fat on each cut, oozing with bloody juices. She ate again the sweet cherry windfalls from the orchards of home. She dreamed of eggs or the pith of oranges. She looked a sight, her teeth rotting, her hair wild. She no longer recognised herself when she looked in the mirror. At the end of May the putrid body of Rosa Luxemburg was fished out of the Landwehr Canal, her skull smashed. Franziska heard talk of it in the charity kitchen where she ate in the evenings. This really was the end of the revolution, they said. Franziska wondered what they meant. How could the corpse of a dead woman make any difference to history, which marched on regardless?

  She toiled through the long, hot summer, seeing nothing beyond the end of the drill she was working on, the end of the day, the stain of sunset in the sky. Her strength returned, she had grown a new skin, but she felt she had sunk as low as she could get.

  The year turned. It was mid-February. A dusting of light snow settled on her shoulders as she trudged home. It was bitterly cold. She wrapped the worn remains of the Poznan coat around her as she made her way to the small country station. Ahead of her, hooded figures hurried along the rutted track towards the distant lights of the city. She hurried after them, if only to keep warm. They travelled in a cold carriage. The lights in the train worked only intermittently and when they did they cast a blue sickly light on the pale faces and frostbitten hands of the passengers. As they reached the outskirts of the city, Franziska remembered her arrival in Berlin five years previously. She longed to be back there, caught in that moment of anticipation, instead of here stranded in an exhausted aftermath.

  She wished she was going home to the Wingenders, where at least there would have been warmth and food, but she had left her lodgings on Beulestraβe in the summer of 1919. She had told Frau Wingender she was going home. She had a home to go to after all. Now there was a republic of Poland, not just the dreamy empire of her father’s drunken sentiment. The Wingenders were happy for her. Doris helped her pack, what little there was – two suits of clothes, the matryoska doll, the tarnished Dulski pendulum – into her battered suitcase, which had survived the war in a nest of cobwebs under the Wingender sisters’ bed.

  ‘What a shame you’re leaving,’ Doris said sadly, ‘just when things are improving.’

  Things were improving for Doris. Fritz had secured a job in a printer’s shop in the days following the Armistice. It was an unskilled job, feeding the furnace and dragging bales of paper around, but the shop had the job of printing travellers’ coupon cards and when one batch was ordered to be destroyed Fritz simply pocketed them and made a killing selling them off at exorbitant prices. The Wingenders shared in his ill-gotten gains. And Franziska too – she gladly devoured the extra bread rations, the eggs, even a chicken or two. But when she looked at the Wingenders she saw a family unscathed. They had lost nobody, whereas she had been robbed of everything. It was easy for them simply to put their lives back together again. Franziska had no old life to put back together. For the first time in years, she thought of Borowy Las and her heart softened at the thought of it.

  Frau Wingender packed her a lunch for the journey – a bread roll, some wurst, a hardboiled egg. She embraced Franziska on the threshold. Franziska inhaled her beery smell for the last time.

  ‘There will always be a home for you here,’ she said tearfully.

  But as she watched Franziska make her way down the stairs and out into the street, she hoped fervently that this was the last time she would see the girl. She had brought madness into the Wingender home. She was a too concrete reminder of the war and Frau Wingender, with the help of Fritz’s black-market trade in forged coupons, was determinedly on her way back up.

  Louise had accompanied her to the station. They said goodbye at the entrance on Franziska’s insistence.

  ‘You’re going to a better place,’ Louise said bravely, ‘you should be with your family, your real family.’

  Franziska nodded dumbly.

  ‘Write, won’t you?’ Louise pleaded.

  She turned away and entered the dark cavern of the station. She wandered among the echoing halls and the belching smoke, mingling with her own kind – refugees with dishevelled luggage, Russians and Poles. A babble of languages streamed past her. She walked as far as the platform serving trains to Stettin and the east. And then she turned around abruptly. She could not go back. That would be one defeat too many. She made her way towards the station’s back entrance and slipped out onto a dark, dim side street. She loitered there for several minutes with the pretence of a woman anxiously awaiting her sweetheart. Then she made her way back through the throng towards the main entrance, making sure that there was no sign of Louise before she stepped out into the rain-soaked square. Time slipped away. She was in a late summer’s evening in 1914. She was arriving in Berlin for the first time. There would be no one to meet her. Nobody knew her name. She was free at last.

  This time she found lodgings in a hostel on Füsilierstraβe, above a bakery. The dormitories were full so she was given a tiny cupboard of a room on the turn of the stairs, which had been used as a store for flour when there had been plentiful supplies. A coating of white dust lay everywhere. There was a hard bed and a chair; the door opened out because there wouldn’t have been enough room for it to open in. It had no window, just a rusted skylight. During the night, the yeasty heat from the bakery oven rose upwards making it toasty and warm, but by day it was like an icebox. Days would go by when Franziska would not speak to a living soul. She rose at dawn and made her way to the train station, rattled to her destination in the country, walked to the farm, where she fed pigs and milked cows, then returned to her caged box. In the evenings she would go to the charity kitchen on Linienstraβe. There was a certain bleak freedom about it, this absolute reduction of her circumstances.

  She alighted at the Anhalter Bahnhof and drawing her coat about her she hurried out of the station. Usually she walked to Friedrichstraβe and took a tram. She liked to peer out at the vulgar nightlife of the street, the red glow of restaurants and neon-lit clubs, the Wintergarten and the Metropol theatres, and feel the dangerous pulse of the U-Bahn underfoot. But on an impulse she turned left, away from Friedrichstraβe, and towards the canal. Cold as it was, she could not face the stifling confinement of her little room. It was dark and another half-hearted snow shower was flailing about her. She felt drawn to the water, its unflurried depths indifferent as time itself. She paused on the bank and watched the silvery surface, speckled with florets of snow. She was about to move on when she became aware of someone standing close to her. She looked up and saw a young man. A pair of hollow eyes regarding her intently, his shadowy face buried in the upturned collar of an army greatcoat and the shade of a forage cap. He was stooped slightly, his hands thrust into his pockets, and beneath his coat she could see a ragbag of civilian clothes, a grubby collarless shirt, the worn and patched serge of trousers, a scuffed and thirsting pair of boots. He smiled at her unexpectedly. People did not smile at one another much these days; it cost too much – a demand of some kind, or the offer of some trinket or illicit food which could not be afforded. She turned away and began walking. He started to follow her. She quickened her step but she could still hear his slow, dogged pursuit. She stopped suddenly and wheeled around. He halted too.

  ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘Why are you following me?’

  ‘It’s a free country, isn’t it?’ He laughed grimly. ‘Or so they tell us.’ He moved closer to her. He smelt of rotting leaves, the ferment of autumn, some stale dark place. She took a step backwards.

  ‘Don’t come near, do you hear?’ she said. ‘Or I’ll scream.’

  ‘I have money,’ he said quietly and fished from his pocket a wad of notes. ‘Look! I can pay.’

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said. ‘What do you take me for?’

 
He moved closer again, but this time she stood rooted to the spot, mesmerised by the cash and horrified by her own fascination. She had never seen so much money.

  She wanted to reach out and touch the notes.

  ‘How much would you pay me?’

  He threw several notes on the ground. She scurried to pick them up before they blew away. She was on all fours on the pavement like a dog sniffing for scraps. He bent down and helped her up, as she clutched the money in her hand.

  ‘Your place then,’ he breathed.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, panicking.

  He bore her across the street, away from the water, her arm bruising beneath his wiry grasp. They walked grimly together for several minutes before he steered her down a side street. It sloped downwards gently. The branches of the bare trees arched overhead, bearing smudged petals of snow. The street was lined with apartment buildings, their wide entrances, sheltered from the snow shower, littered with the crackling leaf-fall of autumn, scurrying to and fro.

  ‘Here then,’ he said, thrusting her into one of their dark doorways.

  He grappled with her coat, pushing it roughly off her shoulders. It fell heavily around their ankles. His unshaven face crushed against hers as he sunk his cold hand beneath her skirt, scrabbling for the feel of flesh. Up close his mulchy smell intoxicated her as she clung to him. Some primal memory of desire stirred. She shut her eyes, trying to hold onto it and to shut out the vision of his devouring stranger’s face. His mouth tasted of sweet tobacco. As he entered her she thought of the money crushed in her hand. She clenched her teeth as he came, bellowing, his head thrown back as if he had been grievously wounded. Then he slumped against her, his head on her shoulder, as heavy as a corpse.

  ‘What is your name, Fräulein?’ he whispered in her ear.

  ‘Sissy,’ she said.

  ‘Mine is Alexander. Alexander Tchaikovsky.’

  Alexander Tchaikovsky told her the story of his life. There in a doorway in Berlin, leaf-crackle and spilt semen at their feet, crushed up against her, so close that afterwards she would not have been able to say what he looked like. He spoke hoarsely in her ear like a man possessed. He and his family had fled Russia after the revolution – his mother, his sister Veronica, his brother Sergei, and his wife.