“Your passport is good, isn’t it?”
“My darling girl, it should be at that price. Don’t worry.”
Cassis was a fishing village with two sandy beaches and one of shingle, with white limestone cliffs, a summer place. A cold wind was blowing. The season was shifting. The little house high on the rough cliffs was set apart from all the rest. It was bare but pleasant, with a wonderful view of the sea. She walked from room to room and looked at it all blankly.
“You’ll stay in this room when you come on holiday. Or would you rather have the one at the side?” If not for Otto, she could have occupied that side room now. The kitchen also had a view of the sea. A dozen aluminium saucepans hung in a row, scoured bright. It had a big table that a person could sit and write at and where bowls of coffee would be drunk. The massive wooden dresser held dozens of elaborately scalloped green plates in every size, the cheap kind the markets sold, in colours that were almost iridescent. She would never eat from one of these.
“There’ll be sea urchins and fresh sardines every day,” said Albert. “I expect I shall get fat again.”
“You don’t even like fish.”
“When you visit, I shall cook for you,” he said—Albert, who could not boil an egg.
As a parting gift, he gave her the little red case, which she had often admired. They walked down the hill hand in hand with her holding the light case in her other hand and swinging it, high and low, just as though she did not care. When he kissed her, four times in the French way, she clung to him. Then she rushed away.
The train was busier going back and she stood, hugging the precious case in her arms. At the Gare St. Charles, without meeting anyone’s eye, she walked from the station into the restaurant. It was now lunchtime and the place was full. She threaded her way through the tables. The kitchen connected by a short corridor to the Hôtel Terminus; that door opened directly onto the street. That was the safe way. Inside the station, the police were a permanent presence, holding inspections at the ticket barrier to see if papers were en règle. This was where most people were picked up, just when they thought they had made it. She had no sauf-conduit: she knew very well that even a child could be picked up and sent away. As it happened, she had not brought any papers with her. Only now did she wonder at her own naivety. Upon an impulse she paused, opened the case. When she saw the big roll of French francs, she slammed it shut. She understood that Albert did not expect to see her again.
Not knowing what to do with the empty hours ahead, she walked down to the harbour and right along to the other side of the transporter bridge, to prolong the moment of the return. The days were drawing in and she needed a new coat: the old one, much too small, seemed shrunken and the cardigan she wore underneath for warmth was stretched tight. She paid her fifty centimes and got onto the platform. As it drew rapidly away from the quay and floated across the water, she saw police vans roar in from both directions at once, blocking any escape route along the waterfront. A woman standing beside her crossed herself; Ilse did likewise. These events were dreamlike and strange, the sharp wind and the blurred city unreal, as were the little figures being herded together near the “salad spinners” and then separated out into smaller groups.
As the transporter slowed at the far end of its journey, she saw the gendarmes single out one figure and lead towards the van a man who might have been her father, were it not that her father never went out. The raincoat was like his; there was something in the bowed angle of the head. Some twenty metres farther along, a woman who had a slight resemblance to Renée, but who of course could not possibly be her, pivoted on high heels and was engulfed by the dark porch of Saint-Ferréol.
He was not in the kitchen. Two packs of cards lay neatly on the table. The bed was made. For a long time Ilse sat in the silent room with the cupboard open checking every few minutes that his coat really was gone. The feeling grew that if she looked away for long enough then the coat might reappear and with it the sound of the cards snapping on the table. The piece of cardboard with the typewriter keys drawn on it mocked her. The emptiness of the room was that of a person holding their breath, a person who might asphyxiate from the waiting.
The noises of the house went on, the occasional shriek and laughter, the banging of new clients on the front door, the thudding of feet on the stairs. The world continued to turn as if nothing had happened. It was nearly midnight when Renée came through the curtain with a heavy tread. She locked the door behind her, shooting the bolt and clicking the small table lamp on. “He’s been taken to Les Milles. It’s a detention camp near Aix. I’ll get him in the morning.”
“I don’t understand. What was he doing away from the house?”
“We went to the photographic studio, just across the road. He didn’t have a decent photograph. We never got there. It was bad luck. Where were you?”
“I went to Cassis.”
“I see.” She had had her hair done and it glinted an unnatural gold. Her mouth turned down, the petulant folds etched deep into each corner. Ilse could not summon any emotion beyond disbelief.
“The photographic studio?”
“He needed a photograph. To make false papers. For an exit visa.”
“An exit visa?” Ilse repeated stupidly.
“Yes. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”
Ilse felt sick.
“You can spring anyone for cash. I’ve been to the Préfecture, I know people there. I’ll go back in the morning.”
The bed was big without him. The smell of eau de cologne brought a lump to her throat. Though she did not expect to sleep at all, Ilse at once fell into a complete darkness.
The next day, rising through varying levels of sound and greyness to a dull consciousness of everything being strange, she was astonished to see how late it was, nearly noon. Renée reported back that Otto had been transferred elsewhere, she did not know where. One source said that he might be in transit to Paris; another that he was in Gurs, one of the worst such places, in the Pyrenees. It cost money even for this inadequate information. Renée bribed a man of authority in the Commission de Criblage.55 The going rate for releasing a refugee picked up in a rafle56 was two or three thousand francs. A Jew cost more. She went out again in the afternoon to see Carbone, the man she called the emperor of Marseilles. Even he was not able to discover where Otto was.
“You could have bought the Pope himself for what I offered. No deal.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, she lit a cigarette. Ilse had never seen her smoke before. It was Virginia tobacco, the kind Raymond brought. Her shoulders sagged.
“Unfortunately, I think he might have been carrying a gun.”
There was no point going out and nowhere to go. A moment came in the dull afternoon, as the sky darkened into night, when Ilse began to play patience, shuffling the pack as her father had. The silence in the room had an entirely different quality from the silence she and her father had shared. She noticed the way her hands were made and the cuticles shaped; she noticed the grain of the wood of the table, which ran the opposite way to the grain of the floorboards. She heard the voices in the alleyways. Though the queens came out again and again, of the kings there was no sign.
TEN
Near Dortmund, January 1941
Even the inside of the carriage had iced up. Frost had eventually silenced the tongue of the heavy fellow who got in with them at Hanover. After Bielefeld, they and he were the last ones left in the compartment. The fat man wiggled a jar of goose fat from his coat pocket, smeared it thickly onto bread with a pocketknife and crammed great chunks into his mouth, rapidly chewing and gulping. The rich smell in the small space was a provocation. Nicolai and Lore exchanged a look. Poor hungry Sabine cried herself to sleep, her breath a cloudy mist. The train inched to a halt just outside Dortmund station. Stamping to warm his feet, the black marketeer heaved down his case from the rack with self-pitying exhalations; it was so heavy, it had to be full of similar jars. He dragged it along the corridor. Nicola
i sprang up, pulled the blackout blind down over the compartment door, held tight to the chilly handle. The station came, doors slammed, the train moved on. Nobody tried to come in. He sat.
“My husband hates such men,” said Lore. “They make him shake with anger, literally shake.”
“He made me feel hungry.”
She smiled wearily. “Rest, Nicolai. Try and sleep.”
Sabine slept on, cheeks scarlet in the knitted bonnet. The train juddered, buffeted by one passing the other way. Easing up the blackout blind by the width of a curious finger, Nicolai peered out. A long black troop train slid by, an eel through dark waters.
Lore was drooping. He sat, conscious of her head on his shoulder, the weight of a woman’s body, slight but definite, her warmth. He sat still and upright, so as not to disturb her. In February he would be fifteen. Already the height of a man, he towered over her. Everything about her touched him: the faint shine on her good stockings, that she had dressed up for the journey, the scuffed shoes, her hand, with a hard bump on the thumb from sewing. He looked at the way her hair fell from the parting, the hairpin, which was working its way out from under the little hat. One side of him was warm, where she lay against his heart.
All through that Christmas of victory celebrations, he had been conscious of her holding herself together, waiting. She was desperate to go to Wuppertal and seek news of her daughter, but had only the statutory day off. Magda was celebrating the coming of Christ with her brother at their farm in the Eifel. The temporary cook was not accomplished; tempers wore thin. Fräulein Lore held their household together. His mother said she could not go away now; she complained that the party season was the worst possible time, that her annual holiday was not yet due. It was true, but she was, as usual, missing the point. The alternative was to lose her altogether. Nicolai had chosen a morning when the house was quiet.
“I’ve had a wonderful idea, Mutti,” he said, smiling broadly. Fräulein Lore had taken Sabine sledding, and his mother, paying bills, which she hated to do, was glad of a distraction. He and Sabine longed to go on a little trip with the Fräulein. It would do them good to visit the countryside; it would be a little holiday. While he fabricated, she played with the gold cigarette box the Colonel had given her, running a finger across its polished shagreen lid.
“Wouldn’t you like a bit of time on your own? Away from your bothersome children?” Cunningly, he slipped the bait onto the hook. “You could visit Wolf in Lübeck. He’d love it. It can’t be fair that we have you all the time.”
“You’re being very sweet, darling,” and she flicked open the case. The lighting of a cigarette, for her still a daring gesture, gave him his answer.
It was easy to manage someone when you had stopped caring what that person thought of you, and vice versa. His mother was not wicked; she was just lax. Without his father there, she had become a sloppy version of herself. Plenty of women of her class were loose; he had seen them out on the streets, gallivanting with officers. The war had shaken people up like a kaleidoscope, re-forming them into different colours and shapes. When another shake came, they would sort themselves anew. Her moments with Colonel Oster would submerge into a forgotten past. He would not let it affect him. What mattered was that his father should not find out. The anguish he felt on his father’s behalf was so acute, that even now it made his chest ache.
He pushed the thoughts away, went back to studying Lore’s face. Even in sleep the little frown remained. Inside her lay the lost child, his lost friend. As the compartment swayed, as his eyes flickered with tiredness, the Ilse of the passport photograph surfaced, the contour map of her features pushing up inside her mother’s. The young face emerged sharp for an instant, only to sink down again inside the older one, submerging in a sea of sadness.
“Nicolai, wake up. We’re in Wuppertal.” Smiling, she touched his shoulder.
He picked up Sabine; her curls lay bright against the velvet collar of her coat. The train, going on to Köln, pulled out. They stood on the dark platform, shivering. There was a trolley bus, but the train had been delayed and they had missed it. She took the case, which was light. They walked from the station, slipping on icy cobblestones through blacked-out streets; Elberfeld announced itself “Jew-free” with a shiny enamelled sign.
“When I was a child it was two villages, this one and Barmen, joined by the railway. When they connected, they gave the valley a new name. Elberfeld was famous from the twelfth century.”
“What for?”
“Weaving, beer. The water from the Wupper, you see. In the nineteenth century it was the first place in Germany to introduce legislation for the relief of the poor. I wrote a thesis about it.” She gave an ironic smile. “There must have been plenty of poor. It’s an industrial town.”
“Making?”
“Textiles? I don’t know anymore. Who knows what they make in a Jew-free town.” She was still smiling.
They struggled up the stairs; he carried the suitcase and the still sleeping child.
“What beautiful children, what a good boy,” said the innkeeper’s wife, taking off Sabine’s bonnet and stroking her cheek. “How old is this little sweetheart?”
Her eyes opened, she stared accusingly. “I’m not little! I’m big. I’m going to be four.”
The kind woman came back twice, once with milk, once with a big plate of bread and butter, which the three of them devoured.
They breakfasted late in a wood-panelled dining room. The inn, newly constructed, was substantial. Coming in and out with breakfast, the woman confided that business was good, “bigwigs” stayed there. There was real coffee and rye bread and butter, the coffee boiled bitter but still good with hot milk. A speckled egg appeared, “for the baby,” and no ration card was asked for. Sabine soon disappeared after her into the kitchen and did not return. Thick crocheted lace curtains hung at the windows. Heat radiated from the stove, covered with blue Delft pattern tiles. Two sets of windows, an inner pane and an outer, kept the warmth in. The deep sills were crammed with those spiteful green spikes known as mother-in-law’s tongue; the scratchiness of them against the lace hurt his eyes.
“What should we do while you’re gone?”
He knew that she wanted to go alone.
She shrugged. “There’s always the Schwebebahn. It’s a special train. The Kaiser rode in it. When I was a child we used to dress up one day a year and ride in the emperor’s carriage. Best bonnets and bibs.” She was being as cheerful as anyone could. Nicolai smiled back. A very, very long time ago he had been interested in trains.
By mid-morning he had finished the local newspaper and was bored. In the big kitchen a row of peg dollies with smiling faces pencilled on lay on the table. Small squares of check material were going to be their skirts.
“Sabine, we’re going on a train. Look, here’s your coat.”
Standing on a stool, busy gluing fabric to her fingers, Sabine shook her head. In the yard behind the inn were chickens and she had helped feed them. She was going to tickle the pig’s back with a stick. There were potato pancakes for lunch and afterwards an apple, specially baked for her in the oven with sugar. His sister did not look up from the dollies, she concentrated, sticking out her little tongue. Wiping wet hands on the apron, picking up a bucket of slops and potato peelings for the pig, the woman could not stop smiling at the child.
“One ticket, please, there and back.”
Alter Markt was the nearest stop. Inside the first of the three double cars, a brass plaque explained that the Schwebebahn was the only monorail system in the world to be suspended from a steel rail. The cars rode on the rail, carried by thick metal arms extending down around the rail and mounted to the top of the car. Ten metres above the ground, he enjoyed the novelty, gliding by the black cobweb lace of the trees on the riverbank as the rail followed the curve of the frozen Wupper, the white ice gleaming below. Tilting and turning on the corners, the carriage cut close to the trees; below, thick mounds of virgin snow that had dropp
ed from the branches showed where there had been a thaw, then another frost. A neat track, perhaps that of a fox, disappeared into the woods. Then there were rooftops. The rail hummed over streets for a brief moment, a kilometre or two, before making a neat U-turn within the station house and returning on its track.
On the return journey, obliquely through the trees, a woman who could have been Lore was walking alongside an old fellow leaning on a stick. Closer up, he recognised her grey coat and hat. The man was very shabby with a black coat. A Jew. He knew it at once. How did he know it? Was it the gestures, hands rising and falling? Or was it his anticipation, preknowledge about the Jewish husband? He would trust only the evidence of his eyes. Nicolai got off at the next stop and waited. When she did not come he regretted his impetuosity. Now he had to wait in the cold for the next train. A moment later the old man came round the corner alone, heading away from town.
He followed. When he slowed, so did Nicolai. Peering back over his shoulder, the old man walked faster. So did he, wishing he were not in uniform. Abruptly the fellow fled. Veering right off the icy road, pushing through the hedgerow and losing his stick in the process, he galloped away over the hard ruts of the ploughed field. Nicolai picked up the stick and sprinted along the road bordering the field; the steel tips of his toes and heels rang out on the frosty ground. Across the fields, the black diminishing figure was slipping and stumbling on the rough terrain, the soles of his shoes flapping. Could this tragic clown be her husband? Surely not. He was a rusty old thing, a raven, flapping arms to keep his balance, a black-on-white photographic negative for a comic print.
The Children's War Page 23