She began to worry about money. Her father had hardly any. Her precious stock of francs dwindled; she eked it out. She haunted stalls that sold fruit and vegetables looking for curly kale, which was very cheap, or for purple turnips, which she hated but which cost next to nothing and filled a person up. Sometimes a stall-keeper would throw in a couple of onions or a bundle of cress for nothing; once even a bag of potatoes. Toni’s beautiful bracelet turned out to be very pure twenty-two-carat gold. It fed them for a month. When Ilse went out with her little string bag to buy food, she always felt the same thump of anticipation when she passed the concierge. She was certain that her mother would write and explain why it was taking so long. But weeks passed and no letter came.
As they pushed through the double doors of the café one morning, a very tall thin man jumped up and came over and embraced her father, who stared at him in shock.
“Kennst du mich nicht?”20
“Albert, what have they done to you?”
The thin man gestured at his loose clothes. “Three months in concentration camp.” He was terribly ugly, with a squint.
“You’re so skinny. I wouldn’t have known you.”
“I was fat under the Nazis. The French have done wonders for my waistline.”
“Where were you?”
“I’ve been at ‘Hotel La Falaise’21 peeling potatoes in the mud. Got picked up in the first roundup of foreigners. If I hadn’t been a writer with a few friends, they’d have left me there to rot with the others. Who’s this?” He was staring.
“My daughter, Ilse. Albert Rothberg, the writer and poet—an old friend of mine from Hamburg.” They shook hands. “We used to see a lot of each other in my travelling days,” said Otto. “Ilse, find the waiter and order us coffee and one petit marc, and you can have a hot chocolate. We have to celebrate.”
“Two petits marcs,” called out the stranger. “One for your girl. She is very pretty, isn’t she! A beauty.”
Nobody had ever said such a thing about her. Before Ilse, blushing, had taken more than two steps towards the copper counter, the waiter was ready to take the order. She turned to get another peep at the man who could command such attention and saw that he was still staring at her. His jet-black hair was too long. His sallow skin hung down around his long jaw and even his strange eyes sagged—he really was an exceptionally ugly man, with big hands. His face in repose was positively sinister. But when he winked at her, as now, his eyebrows shot up and down energetically and he radiated amusement.
“Albert, what are you going to do? Will you stay in Paris?”
He shrugged. “If they leave me alone, I will. Write, if I can. I have my foreign royalties. A few articles. There’s the possibility of a play. Do you know a good translator?”
“Three dozen. I wish I did it myself. But I never had any gift for languages. I’ve written a few articles nobody wants. Where are you living?”
That her father was writing something was news to Ilse.
“Hotel l’Univers—while the dollar royalties still come through. It’s a dump but it’s all right. You can visit me there. Ilse can read to me. I need a good reader.”
“Read what?”
“Plays. Poems, prose, anything.” Albert was looking at her again. “I think you’d be wonderful.”
“Me?” said Ilse.
“You. How far away are you?”
“We’re in a little pension a few streets away.” Her father reached out and squeezed Ilse’s hand. “My little girl looks after me very well. Where’d I be without her?” When her father smiled at her or was kind, as he was now, his expression was very sweet and his whole face was different. At moments like these, she felt that they were perhaps only one step away from really understanding each other.
“Albert Rothberg! Wonderful!” A woman was bearing down on them, followed by a tight-faced man in a very smart suit.
“Excuse me?”
The woman, who wore a lot of makeup, was very pretty, her blond hair expertly waved. She leaned over to embrace Albert. Her scent was very strong. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten poor old Tilly. Tilly and Franz Wolff—you know, we met years ago. With Franzi Heiden—don’t ask about him. I suppose we’re all shadows of ourselves.”
Albert’s good eye looked at her bosom and then her lips. “Not you,” he said gallantly. “You’re more beautiful than ever. You must sit with us.”
Chairs were found, drinks arrived. Albert pushed one across to Ilse and ordered two more, looking at the blonde. Ilse’s faint chagrin surprised her. She dipped her tongue into the drink, feeling grown-up. The marc was extremely strong; she knew she wouldn’t finish half of it.
“We don’t know where to go. Paris is so crowded. Where are you staying?” The pretty woman smiled and pulled her chair closer to Albert.
“Here’s a good one!” Vati suddenly stood up, swaying a little, as though he was the one who had drunk the marc. “Hitler’s in heaven— where else? And he says to Moses, You can tell me this in confidence, Herr Moses. Wasn’t it you yourself who set the bush on fire?”
Everyone burst out laughing, and her father, leaning over Albert, said something to him. Looking around at their amused faces, Ilse noticed that the man in the smart suit barely smiled. Albert stood up and started shrugging on his coat.
“Come on, or we’ll be late for our outing,” said Vati, smiling round at them all broadly and drawing his arm through that of Albert. He gestured to Ilse to hurry up.
Outside, as they moved away down the Rue de Tournon in the opposite direction to home, Ilse plucked at Albert’s arm. He was still chuckling.
“What was so funny?” She had never heard her father joke like that before.
“The Reichstag fire.”
She had no idea what he meant.
“The joke is based on the Nazi claim that the Jews destroy their own synagogues—”
“Just tell me, do you actually know them? Her?” Her father, interrupting, wasn’t drunk after all, though his cheeks had a fiery red tinge. Albert shook his head. “Albert, you’re a bloody fool to even talk to her.”
“Why, Vati?”
“Can’t you see she’s poison? Celebrated people like Albert, who are wanted in Germany—they’re on a list. They’re trophies to be bagged.”
“Some trophy. He thinks I’m a lion, but I’m not. I’m a donkey.”
Donkeys were gentle beasts. She liked the idea of being a donkey.
“What happens if you’re on a list?” she asked.
“If the Gestapo catch up with you, you’re finished. You disappear. That’s what happens.” Her father was curt.
“The Gestapo are not operating in France, my dear Otto.”
“If you believe that, then you’re a complete fool.”
Her father strode ahead. His angry haste brought home the deep truth of why she could not write openly to her mother. Her father had to be on a list. B for Blumenthal. His was probably the very first name on it.
All the way back to their pension, Albert kept disappearing into shops, so she had to catch up with Vati each time and tell him to wait. He folded his great height into their one chair and, with the two of them sitting on her narrow bed opposite, laid out a roast chicken, which he took apart neatly with a pearl-handled penknife, peering at it shortsightedly. It smelt wonderful. There was cheese and a slab of goose liver pâté, which he said he was addicted to. They relished the rich food. The men drank a bottle of wine between them and then Albert produced a small bottle of brandy from his briefcase. They drank from the big cups, Albert becoming the first to use her mother’s cup, fork and plate. Her father fell asleep and they put a pillow under his head. Ilse felt very happy to see him sleeping peacefully, his thin chest rising and falling gently.
Ilse made “muckefuck” coffee out of ground-up barley, real coffee now being beyond their means, and Albert accepted it gracefully though he clearly was not used to it. Afterwards, he persuaded her to read to him. His eyes really were very bad and she sa
w that he could not puzzle out the small print. She read a poem by Heine and another by Rilke.
“Good,” he said. “Really. Try these.”
He delved once more into his red leather briefcase, fanned out a sheaf of papers. After a while she realised that these had to be his poems. She read, hesitantly. It was odd what he wrote, very sharp and savage, and completely unlike the person he appeared to be. But it had rhythm and a kind of clever roughness. She stopped at the bad words, but he laughed at her and made her say them. Next he produced a manuscript written in the tiniest writing. After an hour, putting down the papers to get her breath back, she felt that she had known him all her life.
“Faster, go on. Giddy up.”
“I’m not a horse. Or a donkey, like you.” That made him laugh.
“You’d make a lovely donkey. Well, Ilse, you’re bursting. What do you want to ask?”
“Why do you write about death and sadness and people killing each other? Why can’t you be amusing in your stories? In real life you’re funny.”
“Somebody has to do the dirty work.”
“I mean it.”
“I only have a certain amount of funniness in me. I have to eke it out. I might live a long time.”
She did not know what to say to that.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’m saving myself for you, when you grow up.”
“I’m thirteen. It’s too long. You’ll be all used up by the time I’m twenty-one.”
“That’s why I eat. To keep up. Look,” he said, showing her as he moved the notches on his belt. “It is my duty as a good German to fatten myself for the kill. Of course, in Paris they don’t have geese like the Hamburg geese.”
“Albert, how did you meet Vati?”
“The great and noble cause.” He saw that she didn’t understand. “The fight against fascism. He came to Hamburg to speak to a group of writers. He was full of mad ideals. How the comrades would overthrow Hitler and bring about a social revolution with our pens. But the other side had guns. Rather more effective, you see.”
“Vati has lots of ideals.”
“Your father’s a great hero. His ideals are the only thing that spoil him.”
Ilse laughed out loud. Albert was very different, of course, especially in looks, but somehow he reminded her of Willy.
Albert had proper papers and permission to be in France. He was en règle, wholly official with special status as a celebrated writer, even though he was a Jew on the list of those proscribed and sought by the Nazis. Prominent writers had petitioned for him to be given French citizenship—which, ironically, he said he had no desire to take.
“Don’t you want to be French?” she asked.
“In the years I’ve lived away from Germany I’ve come to live more inside my head, more inside the language. German is my fatherland. I’ve not become French in any sense.”
How odd that was, when she so yearned to be French herself.
“It’s always best to keep all your options open. If I’m to change nationality, I’ll decide when I must.”
For years, Albert’s royalties had come through twice annually from the United States and Canada in handsome sums held on deposit in a dollar account. He could even take his money in dollars, which more than doubled its value. In the Café Tournon, he held court at his “own” table and grandly played the part of the poet. He talked of literature and art, proclaimed himself uninterested in the politics that preoccupied the others, bored by the trivia that swept through the place in waves of gossip and rumour. Others discussed who was in Paris and where, how much a bribe to this or that official cost. Albert told her about the politics of Heinrich Heine, exiled in Paris a century ago, just as he was now. He flirted all the time; it took a while for her to understand that that was what he was doing.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
He leant across the table confidingly.
“Go on.”
“About women. The uglier they are, the more fascinating and beddable. Much more so than the pretty ones.”
“Why?”
“Because they try harder. Pretty women can be so dull.”
Ilse did not think that any woman would say no to him, once she knew him. When she saw him with a new beauty, Ilse would wink to remind him of his principles on ugliness and he would catch her eye and signal back with his one good bulldog’s droopy eye, the other one always staring across his nose at some other place.
Waiting for her mother made them both restless. It drove her father to the café whereas Ilse, loving calm, preferred churches. Something about the three great archways at the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Paris repelled her; the building did not have a human aspect. She liked Saint-Michel better. There, kneeling, she made sure that all her coat buttons were in order, each one from bottom to top, touching each lightly and saying her mother’s name.
“Dear Lord,” she said, “keep Lore Blumenthal alive and well and I will always honour you. Do not let them find us and take us back, Lord.”
Saint-Sulpice, being closest to the café, became her favourite. She attended mass or slipped in behind wedding parties. So many took place in these strange weeks; it seemed a curious way to prepare for war. Rituals and holy smells soothed her, as did the Latin, unfamiliar and rich sounding. On clear, sunny days she checked the progress of the sun calendar. Two centuries earlier, the curé of the church had commissioned a gnomon, a device to measure the passage of the sun through the sky. He had wanted to know when the glory of the resurrection would come: Easter Sunday was always the first full moon after the equinox. Sitting in the quiet of the north transept, she observed how the low winter light shafted across above her head. By the summer solstice, when the sun was at its highest point, the beam would have retrenched to the southern side of the church, falling directly upon the floor plaque the good man had inscribed in 1745. She would not see this. Her mother would come long before then and they would all be in Africa. But Ilse could sit in her chilly corner and warm herself imagining how a priest, standing on the oval brass plaque before the altar on a sunny Easter Sunday, might delight in feeling God’s light directly on his face.
The winter was extreme, with twenty degrees of frost. Paris rooms had either no heating at all or elderly radiators, which on their top floor barely worked. A man came to turn them on. For days afterwards they made hammering and gurgling noises. Still no heat came out. They had very little money left; she was scared that she would have to sell her mother’s things. She had not yet revealed to her father that she had these treasures. Each time she felt that the moment might have come to sell them, Albert offered them money. Her father took it, always with reluctance, though all three of them knew that they were dependent upon it and him.
“Not to worry,” Albert said. “The year’s-end American royalties are looking good.” He said that she was worth it and more, for the excellence of her reading aloud. He was, as she told him, a terrible flatterer.
“Make the most of Paris,” said her father abruptly in the third week of December, as though they might be leaving soon. Perhaps he had divined her thoughts, her conviction that surely, surely, her mother would be there for the holy solemnity of Heiligabend.22 She wondered what she and Mutti would fabricate by way of a tree. She tried and failed to imagine the three of them celebrating Christmas together, something they had not done for years. In their old house, in the Landsweg, she and Mutti had always carried up the big wooden box from the cellar between them. Together they unwrapped the beautiful glass baubles that were special, because they had belonged to her mother’s mother, who died before Ilse was born. Ilse might decorate the tree, which other less careful children were not permitted to do. Even in the Jews’ House, Sankt Nicholas had found them.
In her case she had a photograph of Willy, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion and wearing his kepi, bearing a great resemblance to his sister. She had begged it from Toni. When her father was out she studied it, his eyes deep-shadowed by the hot sun but always smi
ling at her. She also had a snapshot of the three of them larking around. She was in the middle, laughing, wearing a pretty dress and with her arm slung through both theirs. Ilse could almost feel the heat, if she concentrated hard. When she closed her eyes she saw the early light slanting through the blinds of her room and the flowers on the chest of drawers, and the grey spot on the crackle glaze. Willy’s dares: Could she hop and skip without stopping all the way from where the car was parked to the café? Dared she ring all the doorbells in their street and run away? She did. With him she had been as free as a monkey swinging through the palm trees, finding its way into the light. These places and people still existed; they were all safe.
Her father, coming in unexpectedly early, caught her with this photograph. He looked at it for a long time, his expression strange. “It’s so long since we all lived together properly,” he said. “How long is it?”
“Five years?”
“And you’re much older, not a little girl anymore. I don’t know what people your age want.” In the three months they had been living together his eyes, so dark that they were nearly black, had never looked at her so intently. It made her feel almost breathless.
“I don’t want anything,” she said.
“Do you remember us all living together? We were happy, weren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. How sharply her parents had quarrelled, each time they met.
“When your mother comes it’ll be a new start for all of us. Real family life, Ilse. I didn’t understand how much I needed it, you see, until it was too late. Then, because of you, this happened. I’m a very lucky man.”
Their real life together was so far in the past that she had forgotten it. She remembered the very first time her father had been arrested. The police said they were looking for illegal weapons. They found the pistol her father had kept as a souvenir from the Great War lying in a drawer with the Iron Cross, which he had been awarded for valour. For some reason this made them very angry. For four months he was interned in a camp. When they brought him back, he had two black eyes and a bad look on his face. He had something of the same look now. He gazed around at the cramped room which she had done her best to tidy. “ ‘Ein Volk ohne Raum.’23 That’s us.”
The Children's War Page 10