The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Wife?’ she repeated, but he took no notice and went on with his urgent story. They had reached Rumania, hiding by day, travelling by night. They had hoped for refuge in Bucharest, but it was chaotic there and work was almost impossible to find. Then there was a further calamity. Sergei had been killed in a street fight.

  ‘Rumanians’, he said, ‘are quick with the knife.’

  His wife gave birth in the winter of 1918. A son, Alexis.

  ‘A little tsarevich of our own,’ he murmured.

  His story tumbled out, more frantic than their copulation had been, as if this was what he had paid her for. He had left his wife and baby behind and travelled to Berlin in the hope that if he got work he could send for them. But he was like all penniless refugees. Nowhere to live, no skills but soldiering, no country to go back to. And no papers.

  ‘I had one thing of value, though,’ he said bitterly, pulling away from her. It was the first time he had met her gaze. ‘A pearl and diamond necklace belonging to the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Some old emigré paid me a fortune for it.’

  ‘And how did you come by that?’ Franziska asked.

  ‘Never you mind!’ he said roughly.

  He hitched up his trousers, buttoned his coat, and stumbled away into the white-flecked night. She settled her clothes, pulling her shawl around her, and felt in her pocket for the money he had given her. It was safe. How easy it had been. Then, with a sharp pang, she thought of Hans, and a hot wave of shame washed over her. Her fine young man, her dead boy soldier. She hurried out onto the street and made her way back to the canal, hoping that the sound of her boots on the cobbles and the searing cold would drive all thought of Hans away. On reaching the bank, she made for the bridge, intent on getting back to Füsilierstraβe as quickly as possible. She was shivering and realised that she had left the Poznan coat where it had fallen. But she couldn’t go back. She checked again on the money stashed in her pocket. She paused at the apex of the bridge and withdrew the crumpled notes. One by one she threw them into the water, watching them sink like the watery drifts of snow. She stared down at the dark waters. In the summer children swam here. Skinny urchins yelling to one another as they plunged in, ‘calling out names … Walter, Walter!

  She started. Who was calling? But it was herself, her own voice howling into the wind. She felt his presence close to her. She peered again into the canal and there, there he was, the bright curls, the chubby face, the baby’s smile. She climbed up on the parapet to get a better view. No, no, there was no mistake. He was there.

  ‘Walter,’ she called. ‘Wait!’

  Here he was, after all these years, not gone at all, but here, waiting to save her.

  ‘Baby,’ she sobbed.

  It was then that she jumped.

  Letting go is like breathy flight, an astonishment of air. In her mind’s eye she is a hollow painted doll, tossed carelessly by an unseen hand, undone with each revolution, her outer shell unravelling to reveal a small, then smaller, version of herself until she is no more than a tiny wooden egg. Then the stormy mastery of gravity takes over, the greedy suck of earth. She falls; an overwhelming descent, turbulent and graceless. She cannot draw breath, it flies fleet-footed past her as she tumbles, buffeted and smacked by the stuff of her skirts, which flail around her, smothering her vision. They turn to sodden stone as she breaks the surface of the water. The shocking chill of it makes her gag. Her heart feels as if it will burst through its cage of bone. It is a white moment, flecked by sleet and icy spray and the clenched pain of her entry. White turns to a cloudy green. She is plunged into a murky underworld, billowing sails that were her clothes, her hands like dead white fish. Sprigs of bubbles whisper at her cheek. Down she sinks, her lungs filled to bursting, her limbs straining to ascend as her skirts puff and wave and her hair streams around her like trails of wayward seaweed. Down, down … water gurgles in her ears. She can hear a heartbeat, loud and booming; she is nothing now but water and air. It is over … she has entered history.

  Borowy Las, 1900

  ‘SISSY?’

  Her mother’s voice, harried and querulous, arches across the golden stubble. She peers through the loft opening of the barn and sees her mother far below. Dour-skirted, hands wringing hessian, stray hair weeping from the kerchief bound around her head, she stands in the rutted yard outside the house huddled under its sagging thatch. Sissy dips down, sinking into the springy bed of fresh-mown hay. The stalks tickle her cheeks; she inhales their dry, grassy fumes and gazes at the airy doorway of porcelain blue. She drinks in the vast and cloudless sky, intoxicated by its blue sheerness.

  ‘Sissy,’ Mother calls again half-heartedly, before turning back towards the cowering house.

  In her blue and gold shell Sissy sings absent-mindedly to herself – Valerian, Gertruda, Maria Juliana and Felix. Her brothers and sisters. Valerian is the eldest and almost a man already, then come Gertie, Maria and Felix. Her own name is Franziska, diluted by her brother Felix, whose lisping first attempts at speech produced this double sibilance of sound. Sissy. Strung together their names form an incantation which lulls and mesmerises her. She repeats them because they are magical. They will keep evil away. She is three years old. It is the first full, fat year of the new century. A translucent teardrop of time. It is the life before Walter.

  Gazing through her portal of blue, she is in the inside world. There are two worlds – the inside and the outside – but so far she only knows the first. The world of house and yard and stable. The leering pigs and screeching chickens, the silly heedless geese. Deep mystery of orchard, white lilac and bird-cherry, knee-high florets of cow-parsley and wizened trunks like Grandfather’s bunions. The sanctuary of bowl and wood that is the kitchen, warm and dark and hidden like her own heart. Rough comfort of a pillow, her head between the forked limbs of sisters. The outside world is field and river, town and market, far-flung, wide open.

  Her father stands swaying by the stove. He has been out in the village drinking. The work, bent double in the dusty, dry meadows, gives him a thirst which must be slaked. The warm stench of labour and drink rises off him as he blunders around the dim kitchen. Her mother steers him to the table. The lamp’s glow leaves a halo on the pine. Sissy watches him in the oily light, his rough hands crouched by the tin plate. His head is bowed, his chin resting on his broad chest. He laughs quietly to himself, a ruminative chuckle.

  ‘Papa,’ she whispers.

  He looks up and smiles, a leathery face cracked open by the breadth of his beam.

  ‘Princess!’

  ‘Sissy!’ Her mother appears from the scullery and without looking up barks, ‘Bed!’

  She bears a bowl of broth and a loaf of black bread to the table.

  ‘Princess,’ he says and blows her a kiss. He waves a hand perfunctorily, then runs it through his dark hair. Steam rises from the bowl. He tears a piece of bread from the loaf and eats hungrily. Her mother circles around the table, eclipsing Sissy’s view. Her hands are sunk into the small of her back.

  Papa chomps mutely, then noisily slurps his broth. He wipes the wet ends of his moustache with his sleeve.

  ‘Princess, indeed,’ her mother says. ‘Don’t fill the child up with notions.’

  There is a crash as Papa drops the ladle and thumps the table with his fist.

  ‘Notions? If she has airs and graces it’s not from me she gets them,’ he shouts. ‘I will call her what I like and I won’t have you gainsaying me!’

  Mother retreats to the scullery.

  ‘Isn’t that right, Princess?’ he whispers to her.

  Papa! Later as he dozes by the stove she perches gingerly on the arm of his chair. She loves to be this close to him without him even knowing. Secretly she traces the crevices of his weather-beaten face with her fingers. She knows the sharp gristle of his eyebrows and the vertical line that divides them so deeply that she can fit her little finger in the cleft. She knows the flare of his nostrils and the nest of hair which emanates from their dark caves.
She touches the speckled bush of his moustache and the sickle marks of his rare smile. His ears are large and cavernous. Here there is more hair. So much that Sissy thinks that inside her father there is only undergrowth, a mottled tangle that sprouts from his ears and nose and creeps up his chest. There are even tufts of it on his lower knuckles. She follows his hair line down to the promontory of his widow’s peak. The skin there is softer, shiny as a polished egg. Time has ploughed across his brow, leaving furrows deep as potato drills. She travels down the sharp line of his nose, leaping from its tip to his wet open lips. She taps lightly on his teeth, then fingers the bristled sureness of his chin. Next his craggy neck, lined like a tree trunk. She thinks she can guess his age by counting the rings. Now she is journeying blindly in the stretched tendons of his jaw until she strikes the knotted hardness of his Adam’s apple. She presses softly on it and it moves like the stone of a plum in a pickle jar. His eyes snap open, a bleary, flecked-brown gaze. His arm flails and sends her flying.

  ‘Get this child off me!’ he roars.

  He looms over her as she picks herself up, rubbing a bruised elbow.

  ‘Princess,’ he breathes. He cups a large hand around her head. ‘Look at you, straw in your hair. What have you been doing? Rolling in the hay?’

  He parts her hair with his hands and picks through the strands, plucking pale papery stalks from her dark, night-damp curls. Papa loves her hair, though Mother, washing it bad-temperedly, says it is a curse. It is Papa who takes the comb to it, patiently undoing all the tangled clots and the matted pockets of resistance until he has completely tamed it.

  When she is five, Papa takes her to the market. It is half a day’s journey by cart. It is the first time Sissy has been beyond Borowy Las. She and Maria sit in the back, swinging their legs over the edge. Felix sits up front with Papa. It has rained. The wheels of the cart groan as they rumble into pooled craters in the road, spattering her boots. She squeals and Papa gives her a dark look. Maria puts a finger to her lips. She is six years older than Sissy. The first time she made this journey with Papa she had squabbled with Felix, and Papa had warned her he would set her down at the next gate. When the bickering continued, he halted the horse and lifted her down off the cart and left her at the side of the road.

  ‘Why not Felix?’ she had wailed.

  ‘Because I need Felix.’

  Maria waited all day for him to return. Papa found her sleeping in the ditch at midnight.

  Dawn streaks the frowning low sky. Sissy’s stomach rumbles with hunger. There has only been time to gulp down a beaker of warm milk which Gertie prepared before they left. Gertie has stayed behind to look after Mother, although she isn’t sick as far as Sissy knows. The cart smells of damp wood and stale milk. They travel through the grizzled countryside past muddy fields Sissy has never seen before. Cows bellow beneath the dripping trees. She looks down each small lane winding away secretively or burrowing into the furred rumps of fields. She peers over unhinged gates, sadly ajar, leading to churned-up farmyards. Even the houses with their gables close to the road seem forlorn. They are stuck here on the bend of a road or at the puddled end of a lane, while she is moving towards the bright thin line of the horizon.

  Beyond which is the sea, Valerian has told her. He is gone now. One morning early he disappeared. He had had an argument with Papa. Sissy heard them shouting in the yard. It was as if their cramped house was not large enough to hold Papa’s feelings.

  ‘Son,’ he roars at Mother when he comes back in. ‘I have no son.’

  Valerian has gone to Gdansk. For days Sissy walked as far as the shrine at the crossroads and waited. The small statue of Our Lady the Traveller set in a portal of stone marked the boundary with the outside world. From there she would be the first to see Valerian return with his swaggering gait and his bright smile. He went off before when farm work was scarce, but he came back in time for the harvest. But this time, Mother says, is different.

  ‘Your father has driven him away.’

  Gdansk! She likes its name. Like the cranking clangour of cranes, the whiplash crack of breaking ice, the salty spittle of sea. She has never seen the sea, only the big lake near Borowy Las. Gertie took them picnicking there once in the summer. She and Maria and Felix had paddled in the green and soupy shallows while the lake sulked, flat and warm. It stretched as far as Sissy could see. But Gertie, standing on the shingle, her broad face wincing and her hand shielding her eyes from the glare, pointed to the far distance – a stone gable nestling in a puffy breath of trees.

  ‘See,’ she said triumphantly, glad to have found a landmark, ‘that’s the Bronskis’ place.’

  Bronski is the landlord, for whom Papa works.

  But Sissy would not look towards the destination of Gertie’s pointed finger. What she longed for was an unmarked horizon, where land and sky would melt into one another in an unbroken skein, and an ocean wide and endless as the summer sky.

  She is fascinated by water; she wants to know what is going on underneath. In the long lilac evenings swarms of midges and flies hang suspended over the river like a twitching cloud. She squirms her toes in the oily mud. Beneath its glittery, thrashing surface there is a teeming underworld of sluggish earth and slimy stones, a city of gloating toads, worms steadfastly burrowing. She peers constantly at the reflections in the rain barrel in the yard. The face she sees there belongs to a vampire who lives at the bottom trapped in a porthole world. Vampires, Papa has told her, are babies who were drowned without having first been baptised. They grow to the age of seven in water, whereupon they take on human form. When Sissy splashes the surface with her hand the face of the vampire breaks into a thousand shimmering ripples. She worries that in the night the vampire might rise from the barrel and stalk the house. She follows Gertie into the yard on winter mornings, watching as she breaks the ice on the top of the barrel. Sissy always checks to see that the vampire is down below, safely locked in the frozen underworld.

  Maria shook her awake. She could not believe that she had slept and missed so much of the journey. The cart slid across the slimy cobbles. The horse neighed in fright. Sissy had never seen such a crowd; they could barely move for the throng. The street was lined with stalls piled high with food. Peddlers proffered baskets of loaves and bagels. There was the yeasty smell of baking, the pungency of caraway seed. More baskets of plums and cherries sat on trestle tables glistening from the recent rain. There were tubs of smoked herrings, brown beans and hot peas, barrels of gherkins and sauerkraut. The noise was deafening as the traders and stallholders shrieked their unholy litanies, followed by the dull thud of brass weights on scales. Urchins ran along beside the wagon, pulling faces and trying to clamber aboard.

  ‘Oy!’ Papa shouted, and they fell away as he brandished his whip.

  Behind them a skinny boy was driving a gaggle of geese. A water carrier crucified by two pails wove his way through the marketplace. In a dark entrance to a courtyard Sissy spied a cow tethered to a wall and a woman ferociously beating a carpet as if it were a naughty child. Strange men with beads and locks and long gabardine coats hurried along the street, gripping bundles of books. Little boys, wearing velveteen caps and fringed vests, trailed after them. Tendrils of hair hung by their cheeks.

  ‘Jews,’ Maria hissed.

  Felix helps Papa to unload the wagon. He is a strong boy, nine years old but already bursting out of the trousers Mother made him only a few months ago. They flap around his mid-calf. The soles are rising from his boots and make a funny slapping sound, like a dog lapping water greedily. Sissy watches as he hefts a sack of potatoes and cabbages and sets them on the ground. He swings a pair of geese, followed by the sad, scrawny, plucked bodies of chickens whose necks Mother has wrung. Sissy knows the sound from the yard. That awful scurrying, the choking screams when Mother gets her hands on them, the quick snap as she breaks their tiny bones. Now they seem to shiver on the cold cobbles, though Sissy knows this is impossible. They are dead, aren’t they?

 
Finally Felix clambers into a corner of the cart and fetches Mother’s basket of eggs. Carefully he moves to the edge, eyeing the eggs warily. His tongue inches between his teeth in concentration. Suddenly he slips on a wet cabbage leaf and he tumbles off the cart. The eggs fly as if Felix has done a masterful juggling trick. They land one by one with a whiplike crack and succulent splat. Several dogs rush from nowhere, hungry, lean creatures with mangy backs and spindly legs, jostling with one another as they feast noisily. Felix squats on the ground, rubbing his chafed shins and whimpering. Papa rains blows on his head.

  ‘Simpleton,’ he roars. He turns and appeals to the two girls standing in the scattered mess of yolks and whites. ‘Would God not grant me a normal son?’

  It is the first time Sissy realises that Felix is not like other boys.

  On the way home, Papa sang into the night, streamers of bawdy songs. Maria and Sissy had sat in a dark corner of the inn for what seemed like hours while Papa haggled and argued with several other men. Felix was banished to the street, where he had to tend to the horse and watch the cart.

  ‘All you’re fit for,’ Papa growled.

  It was smelly inside the inn, the grainy ferment of ale and the burning of tallow, but at least it was warm and one of the serving girls had given them some bread and pickle. Maria hid a crust in her pocket for Felix. When they finally left they found Felix huddled close to the horse for warmth. It was a clear, cold night.

  ‘You,’ Papa ordered, ‘in the back. With the girls.’

  Every so often he would break off his song and remembering the eggs he would turn around to scowl at Felix. His temper was quick to rise and slow to diminish; he would labour to keep his rage fuelled. Sometimes Sissy believed it was what kept him warm. No matter how cold the weather, Papa always sweated. It oozed from him, fumy and sweet.