If Toni decided to have another martini, Willy would use the time to tend his garden. The planting was all his work. When he left the Legion and bought the house, he had planted the three cedar trees along the path, which now shaded the bedrooms. These were flanked with junipers and thuyas. The great mass of vivid pink flowers were bougainvilleas. Willy said that Meknès, like Fez, was watered by wet westerly winds; still, there was never enough rain for a really beautiful lawn. He loved to make the spray of the hose arc high into the air and threaten her with it.
“Dare me. Go on.”
Hopping and squeaking “I dare you! I dare you!” she would dart about the courtyard in and out of the columns and behind the cedars, and he would aim and fire and turn the marble a slippery pink until in the end he would get her and soak her, helpless from laughing too much, from head to foot. Then, so Toni would not be annoyed, she would have to scramble into another dress in half a minute. Rubbing at her hair, she would stare through half-closed eyes at the photograph of her parents which she had rescued from obscurity and which now stood on the chest of drawers. She was trying to put her mother into the arms of a big man, quite nice looking, with a weak chin. Always, though, Otto came back in full strength.
A letter in her mother’s writing addressed to Willy lay on the breakfast table. Ilse shot past Toni at her desk, ran shouting to the big bathroom and dragged Willy into the kitchen with shaving foam still on his face. He opened it, scanned the first line. “For you,” he said, smiling and handing it over. “Am I allowed to shave now?”
She devoured it instantly, then read it again. Her mother wrote that she was overjoyed that Ilse was safe and happy. She could not wait to see her and be with her. She said that she had sent a previous letter, which had been returned to her stamped Opened by the Reichs Post Office in order to ascertain sender because she had foolishly forgotten to put her address on the envelope. So this time she would remember to give it. Ilse turned over the back of the envelope, where she read Tante Käthe’s name and address in Krefeld. Of course she had to put an Absender.9 Anything from a Jews’ House would always be opened by the authorities. Did that mean she was now living with Tante Käthe? Ilse frowned. She could not imagine that. The letter was rather shorter than she had hoped. Her mother sent much love, thanked Willy for the introduction and said the job possibility he had mentioned was looking very hopeful.
“Why is it so short? Why doesn’t it sound like her?”
Ilse watched his face as Willy scanned it.
“It’s fine. I think she’s saying to be very careful because she’s scared of the censor. We have to write to Krefeld now and old Käthe will send the letters on. I hope my aunt doesn’t throw your letters away. She’s not quite there. You know, not all the cups are in the cupboard,” said Willy, winking. This expression amused Ilse.
“What did she mean about the job?”
“I got in touch with a family I know in Hamburg, the Riemkes, old friends of mine. They know everyone, and I thought they might find her something. She needs to earn decent money, fast. In a city it’s much easier.”
“It’s so far,” she said. It was odd to imagine her mother undertaking such a thing without her.
“Wuppertal is so small. In Hamburg she can make a fresh start.”
“How clever you are,” said Ilse, rejoicing in the thought of her mother freed from the claustrophobia of that crowded house, earning plenty of money. “I wonder how Mutti got permission to travel to Hamburg?”
“Permission?”
“Only Aryans travel,” she said.
“She is an Aryan. If she doesn’t use your father’s name, that is.”
She thought about this. It had never occurred to her before that her mother could behave like an Aryan. But she was one and perhaps now she could. Of course things went on and were different, without her. Ilse wrote back at once, telling her mother about school and the smooth way the nuns walked, as though they ran on little castors under their skirts. How incoherent her last letter must have been, all pleasures and sensations jumbled up. Sucking the end of the pen, Ilse waited for the right words to come. They seemed to lie elsewhere, in the pauses between the careful strokes of the pen. “Please come soon,” she wrote, “it is so lovely here,” when she wanted to write that her mother should get out as fast as she could. Willy had warned her not to say anything contentious. She knew that she certainly should not mention a ticket, or the hope of an exit visa. So she wished her mother good luck with the job and that she hoped it would pay very well and underlined that twice. She would understand. Then she sucked some more on the pen. It gave Ilse a pang to think of Mutti alone in Hamburg when she had so many people now. Meknès was full of Willy’s and Toni’s friends.
After dinner, if they were not going to the cinema, Willy and Toni would drop Ilse back and go out to a nightclub with Heinz and one of his girls. Heinz’s love life enjoyed continual shifts and turns. Toni explained that he generally had three women in his life. There was the current favourite, the last one—who was being eased out very gently—and the next, who was being brought on. Ilse had got used to Toni’s breathtaking frankness. This being a school night, she was supposed to sleep, but could not. Ilse lay with her mother’s letter under her pillow, looking at the stripes the moonlight made coming through the blinds and imagining her getting the good job. She wondered what it would be. She had tried so many things to earn money. It should be better than being a waitress, though not as good as being a lawyer. Three years earlier Hitler had stopped all women from being lawyers; how upset her mother had been.
She was still awake when they returned. The house was so quiet, she could hear the faint sound of Willy and Toni talking. Sometimes she could not sleep because of the way they argued, her voice high against his low occasional rumble. Toni was like a storm which raged but then blew over quickly, bringing clear skies.
“A hundred reasons for being an atheist,” announced Willy in the car.
“We’ve done them all,” she said.
“We can’t have—”
“You told me the one about the priest and the housekeeper. And the one about the bleeding statue made of red clay. You told me last week.” She was glad that he did not know about her wanting the cross.
“Those are Catholic ones. This is a Mohammedan one, about the great prophet Sidi Aïssa, who performed so many miracles that it was not possible to count them. His admirers were legion, too many to count. Too many to handle. That’s his house over there.”
It was an ordinary-looking white building with a green roof.
“Go on.”
“So he summoned them to the square in front of his house and said, The prophet demands the sacrifice of the most faithful. Who of you are that? What do you think happened?”
“They ran away?”
“No. One man stepped forward. The crowd waited, and from the house there came a terrible scream. Blood ran over the doorstep. What do you think the believers did then?”
“They all ran away.”
“They had faith, Ilse. A second went in and a third—and more blood flowed, but the square began to empty.”
“See? They weren’t stupid after all.”
“They withdrew. Then Sidi Aïssa came out of his house leading the forty sacrifices. Allah had given them the power to let their blood flow without dying. But it was the blood of forty sheep.”
“Poor sheep.”
“They had a feast. Ate them. Did I tell you about the time I was offered the sheep’s eyeballs, as a special delicacy at the wedding of my friends?”
“Yes! Yes! Don’t!” Ilse was squeamish.
“Don’t worry. Nobody really eats them,” but he mimed putting them into his mouth and making the imaginary balls pop from one cheek to the next until she begged him to stop.
“Where there’s religion, something has to be sacrificed. Always.”
“All right.” She thought for a moment. “Are you saying religion is always a bad thing?”
“I’m saying it
shouldn’t count. That it doesn’t matter. It’s the great tragedy of the twentieth century that it does. Ask Toni.”
Of course she didn’t. Ilse knew not to ask Toni anything unless she was perfectly sure that she wanted to know the answer. At night, snug in the neat little white bed in the room she loved so much, she would go over in her head the things Toni had been right about. There was the business, which her mother could and should have taken charge of. Now the shop belonged to the Aryan manager. There was politics and also religion. Her father said that religion was irrelevant in the twentieth century. That was why she had never been inside a synagogue, nor eaten kosher food, except at Tante Röschen’s. Otto had been wrong about that, too. Sleepily her thoughts drifted away from that unreal Germany where everything was so difficult. She was never going to go back there. Nobody could force her. She thought instead about the food Marie was making for the picnic on Sunday, spicy lamb with mint and rice and a huge tagine with couscous. She was growing, putting on weight. She wrote to tell her mother that, carefully licking the envelope shut and writing Tante Käthe’s address in her best writing. The old lady would not forget, she would send the letters on. Mutti would be so pleased. She thought dreamily about how, when she arrived, her mother would love the couscous and the silk. Their colours would be exactly the same. They would forget all about Germany and never talk about it ever again.
In Ifran, the air was so clear that the mountains looked like picture postcards. The pretty villas with their lush green gardens in the European style made the people who had not been home for a long time feel very nostalgic. Heinz had brought his new girlfriend and there was another German couple and a French one and a Moroccan lawyer from Fez and his wife and their baby. As they lay eating a lazy lunch, it seemed impossible that their nations could fight each other. Ahmed, their Moroccan friend, asked the men whether they supported France or Germany.
“France,” said Toni right away. “We’re French by naturalisation and champagne.”
Toni had not spoken much French before she came to Morocco but now she was as quick as anybody, rattling it off and making the men laugh.
“Neither,” said Heinz. “We belong to the Legion. The treizième demi-brigade owns our souls.”
“Our friends are the kinds of Germans Hitler doesn’t like, and we’re the kind of French nobody likes,” said Willy and then the men got into a discussion about independence and what would happen to Morocco if war came.
Ilse cuddled the baby and watched Willy, languidly laid out on a rug enjoying a smoke but always turning his face and screwing up his eyes against the sun to see where his wife had got to. If she talked too long to some other man then Willy would fidget, losing the thread of his own conversation. When Toni wandered down to the pine trees at the water’s edge, scuffing her high-heeled sandals through the soft ridges of pine needles, Willy and Ilse went too. Monkeys were running wild. Willy said there was always snow here in the winter, that she would love it at Christmas. They would go dancing at one of the smarter hotels, see “les palmiers en fête.”
“Will Mutti be with us by then?”
“She’ll dance us all off our feet,” he said and winked.
Heinz and Ahmed wanted to go fishing. Ilse went with them to rent a boat at the Châlet du Lac. She was allowed to row it, proud of her prowess though it raised little blisters on her palms and thumbs. From her position on the still waters she could see, but not hear, Willy and Toni walking and talking, back and forth at the edge of the water. They looked serious. But when she got back from the rowing, Willy lay at his ease under the pine trees at the water’s edge and smiled his usual smile.
Her French was improving rapidly. She and her friend did homework together. With Anne as her dictionary, she looked up fewer words and wrote more fluently. She made up a story about a little monkey separated from its tribe. The monkey, which had wanted to be free, found itself threatened by wild animals. By swinging through the trees, always letting the sun flash a certain way through the palm fronds, it managed to find its way back to its people and safety. Soeur Mathilde congratulated her on her story, said it was an allegory, one of the few words that was exactly the same in French, German and English. She was learning English now.
At the end of term, Ilse was awarded the prize for the best story and was called up to receive a silver cup, which was hers until the next term began. Lots of girls applauded. Proudly she placed it on her chest of drawers alongside the photograph of her parents. She polished them both with a special liquid Marie had. Ilse would have been completely happy, were it not for the news. The Europeans in the cafés were disagreeing noisily, pointing to the newspapers and speculating. The talk was all about the coming war, about Hitler’s aggression and whether the Munich agreement would hold. When war came, German citizens would be interned. No, they would all be repatriated. Not to worry, Willy said. They should all take French citizenship, as he had. The French had a huge army, they would defeat the Germans, providing, of course, that the Legion was in on the fight. Then they heard that there would be peace. The British minister had fixed it.
Toni scoffed at that. She was the first to join in the endless speculation, driven to know the latest rumour and then to analyse it. Willy asked her to stop, saying that he was sick of listening to stories of German aggression, but Toni would or could not.
Ilse tugged at his arm. She whispered, “We should be frightened of the Germans.”
“I was born German, wasn’t I? Are you frightened of me?” His eyes were sad.
“Never.”
She felt free with these adults, with their complicated but care-free lives. She knew that Willy loved her and she loved him without reservation.
At night Willy and Toni took to arguing with a different tone. These were long discussions. It was about where they would go when war came and what to do with her. Her visa would soon expire, so a decision had to be made, to apply for residence or not. If Willy chose to fight, Toni said that they had to send her back. She mentioned Belgium or France. Willy said they could not do that. They had a promise to keep. Toni said a good deal about the duties of parents. She kept saying that they had to be practical. Ilse, who knew that Toni was very practical indeed, could not bear to hear any more and put her pillow over her head. She thought that if she kept quiet on the subject, she might be able to conceal her stubbornness—a fault so great that her mother had once said it extended to the point of wilfulness. She passionately wanted not to be sent back, for clearly her mother had made the right decision in sending her here. Yet she could not oppose whatever Toni chose to do. Ilse understood and admired Toni’s terrible straightforwardness, which made her unlike any other woman.
For Toni’s birthday they went away for a week, driving first to Rabat, then purring along the good tarmacadamed coastal highway to Casablanca, which, as its name suggested, was a city of white buildings with the most elegant shops. They spent one night in a hotel looking onto the grey rolling sea and early the next morning they took the road up to the broad plain of Blad el Hamra. Marrakech was two hundred and fifty kilometres away, said Willy. Ilse watched the mountains coming ever nearer, until they were passing through hundreds of palm trees with the red ramparts of the city ahead. It was, as Willy had promised, a broad city of gardens and very green. Their hotel lay on the edge of the city walls, surrounded by palms and fruit trees, and looking towards the high Atlas Mountains. Willy went right away to look at plots of land while Ilse and Toni wandered in the sun-striped alleyways of the souk. Toni was even younger than she had imagined, confiding in Ilse that it was her thirtieth birthday, a great event. She bargained for carpets and bought herself jangling gold bracelets for her birthday present and threw in another one, finely hammered with an elaborate curling pattern, for Ilse. She would not be thanked, skipping ahead and shaking off any hint of gratitude.
They sipped mint tea and ate cakes on the terrace of a café overlooking Place Djemaa El Fna and watched the dancing monkeys, the snake charmers and fire-
eaters. From the little height where they sat, Ilse could see a very old snake charmer, almost bent double, with a very dark face and a very white turban. He sat cross-legged and with his face twisted up, shaking a tambourine and playing his wooden flute. In front of him, a blue wooden box sat in the centre of a piece of dingy carpet. It was from this that the head of a cobra rose. The old man never looked right or left, never took his eyes off the snake and did not seem to care or notice what went on around him. They had the same eyes, man and snake, which they kept fixed upon each other. Ilse sat for a long time paralysed by them, quite unable to move her feet, though she badly wanted to rise and get away from the place. It was the snake which hypnotised the man.
Toni’s birthday dinner was chicken under egg pancake and Ilse’s favourite, lamb with peas and aubergines roasted in an earthenware pot with couscous. Full as they were, Willy ordered pastilla au lait, which you ate with your hands, layers of crunchy mille-feuille pastry with sesame seeds on top and milk poured over. Ilse loved this best.
A large lady came on swathed in veils with heavy makeup and a gold brassiere with dangling beads, the sleeves separate and attached with strings. Even the French couples who talked all the time fell silent to watch her strike a pose. The musicians struck up a high note and she started to shake and turn, and the beads glittered and turned with her. One by one the veils came off, pink, blue, black, green, red and then cream, leaving only the orange one under which could be seen a big wobbling belly. The men applauded as the big woman gyrated her hips more and more rapidly, shaking out the beads. As she began to pull the orange one off, Ilse noticed the French proprietor, a small man in a dinner jacket. He was going from table to table, his palms facing outwards in supplication, talking intently. Behind him, the orange veil came off and the big woman shook and shimmied more violently than ever.
“Messieurs, dames, forgive me for disturbing you,” said the little man. The German army had invaded Poland.
Toni got up and went straight out of the room. Willy followed her. They were gone for a long time, and Ilse, licking a finger to catch the last crumbs of the pastry, waited anxiously for their return. When they came back, Willy said that they had to leave the restaurant straight away.
The Children's War Page 7