“Wait!”
He set off across the fields; with his excellent boots, he could easily catch up, leaping across the furrows. Through a long-distance lens, Nicolai saw himself, a brown spider chasing a black beetle along a length of striped mattress ticking.
“Hello! Stop! Your stick!”
He was nearly upon him when the old man bent double, stopped dead. Wheezing terribly, he fought to get his breath, nose dripping. Water swam in his eyes where the cold had hit him, drops which suddenly gathered in one pouchy eye and ran down his cheek. Nicolai saw himself blurring, re-forming, in that terrible stricken gaze.
“It’s still the day,” he got out at last.
“What?”
“The day.”
Nicolai shook his head in puzzlement. There was a place where the plough had sheared the sod, forming a convenient blank ledge; carefully he placed the stick on it and backed off.
“Jews are permitted outside. In the day. Until eight in the evening.”
“I mean you no harm. I’m sorry I frightened you. Please. Your stick.”
Inching forward, he retrieved it, shaking in his hand.
“Who are you, please?”
“Who am I? Who am I?” The hands rose again. “Whoever you want me to be.” He had a gentle, melodic voice. His was a clever face, but the eyes were tragic.
“Where do you live?”
“Nowhere.” The old man took a step backwards. Of course, he could not possibly understand.
“I’m Nicolai Bucherer. Forgive me. I should have introduced myself—I’m with Lore.”
Again he edged away.
“I mean, are you the husband of Lore Lindemann?”
He shook his head. Another step and another, furtively done, as though these were not his feet taking him away, but someone else’s.
“I am a widower,” he croaked. “I don’t know anyone called Lore.”
It was getting worse and worse. Nicolai wanted to say that he was a Swing Boy, a secret enemy of the state, and not at all what he appeared to be. He wanted to say that he loved jazz and America, and that Jews were his friends. Instead, he felt in his pockets, took all the money he had and held it out. “Please, take it. Please.”
The old man looked at the money with contempt. Holding the stick defensively against Nicolai—a dangerous dog to be kept at bay—he retreated.
They whispered in the room, though there was nobody there to hear. Salomon Blumenthal, the old raven, was her father-in-law; it was very strange that Lore had never met him before.
“I was scared of him once. Of the idea of him. But he’s so small.”
“Is he?”
He dared not say what he had done. In his head, a tiny figure ran in terror across the white fields, no bigger than the peg dollies twirling on a string across the cot in which Sabine slept. If he waited, she would tell him more. The closer they came to her birthplace, the more she had felt the need to confide in him. She had started by telling him that she and her husband had never divorced, had whispered of “Otto” in a station waiting room and the name “Blumenthal” in the quietest outbreath; she had murmured her secrets in quiet patches when a crowded train cleared. All the facts were very peculiar. He watched her frown deepen.
“Otto might have been in touch with his father. What kind of a son does not send a message? But Father Salomon doesn’t trust me. Even if he knows, he won’t say—not to me. He said his children have all left, only he remains. I don’t know if I believe him.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you what he knows?”
“Why? What manner of mother is not with her daughter?”
He looked not at Lore’s face but at the floorboards painted chocolate brown. Every length bore its pale wounded circle where a boot had scraped paint from the raised knots. “Don’t get upset,” he said.
“Of course I’m upset.”
“Your husband has her. It’s not as if she was on her own.”
In the long silence, looking at her bowed head, he tried to form a picture of this husband of hers who was wealthy but had lost all his money; a Jew with no religion, a talker who would have joined an army, if there had been one where people like him could fight. The husband was all contradictions.
“He’ll look after her. You told me what an idealist he is, a fighter.”
“Otto doesn’t think like other people. He wouldn’t leave Germany. I forced him to. I broke his heart.”
Her voice held the deep note of real despair.
“But now he’s there, he’ll look after her.”
She shook her head. “I counted on Willy to save her. And he sent her back. How then can I count on Otto?”
Willy was her brother in Morocco; his friend Ilse had already travelled so very far. “Who could know that France would fall? And so fast.”
“Nobody could know,” he said.
“I should have gone myself to Paris and fetched her. But I didn’t have the money for the documents and the journey, both. I couldn’t arrange it. I sent perfect documents, perfect.”
Her voice went lower all the time.
“You don’t know, Nicolai, how terrible it is to live an unsafe life. I was going to France, to follow him. We had agreed it. We would live in Paris, the three of us together. But I kept thinking, how would we manage? We had no money. What would life on the run be like with a man who can’t even provide for himself? Every time I imagined being with him and Ilse, I just couldn’t. He’s so difficult. We’d never even travelled together.” She drew a long, shuddering breath. “I changed my mind. I thought, Rely on yourself. Work hard. Make a home for her here. You can do better.”
She dropped her head in her hands.
He waited.
“Otto never loved her, not like I did. She was just any little girl to him—perhaps with a boy, things would have been different. He didn’t see how precious she was. When she was leaving forever, he didn’t come to say goodbye. That’s when I stopped loving him. He only thought of himself.”
She wasn’t really talking to him, but to herself. These were the thoughts that ran ceaselessly through her mind, causing that little muscle to tug its electrical impulse at the side of her mouth.
“How could I give her to him? I must have been mad. How could he not send her back to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I couldn’t just walk over the border. I couldn’t. They’d have picked me up right away, I don’t have the nerves for it. Then there would have been more problems, with papers, more troubles. I couldn’t. I knew I’d be trapped, then, in his life. I can’t stand his life.” She sighed, deeply. “I wanted to make it all safe and right.”
“You were right,” he said.
“I have been terribly punished,” she said. “Was it such a bad decision, to bring my child back into a safe world? Was that so wrong?”
He looked at her helplessly. What did he know? “It wasn’t wrong,” he said.
“If only Willy had kept her. In Morocco she was safe—I can’t forgive him for sending her away. But I did the same thing myself. I sent her away on her own. He did what I did.”
She went endlessly over the same thing like the Schwebebahn, which, reaching the end of its route, was forced to turn along the preordained track and retrace the whole circuit.
When he woke in the night, she was still sitting in the same chair. Her eyes were closed, face impassive, but he could almost hear the sharp thoughts running in their circles, blades etching their deep track.
“Please. You must sleep,” he said.
“I know why Otto wouldn’t return her. To punish me. It is like a bad dream where you run and run and stay in the same place. All the choices were right. I took everything into account. But not his peculiar sense of things, what’s right and wrong. I never could think like him. You’re right. I think that they are together. They are together in death.”
In the morning when he woke she was pacing about, dressed in her coat and hat. “I’m going to my old house in the
Landsweg to see the garden I planted. A big, beautiful house, we built it ourselves. Ilse was so happy there.”
At the door she turned, smiling brilliantly. “I’ve been thinking— perhaps I will see her there. Perhaps, who knows? If I wait long enough, she might come to the window and wave.”
It was quite hard getting Sabine out of the warm kitchen and away from the innkeeper’s wife, who had no children of her own, but Nicolai did not care to be alone. Ilse’s face recurred and recurred, locked into his mental album as if he had taken her photograph himself, pored over hundreds of negatives and finally passed just two through the enlarger: little girl, eight, happy; little girl, twelve, sad. Sabine enjoyed the train; he held her up to see the view and, as it tilted on the turns, she laughed. Late in the evening Lore crept in, shivering. She must have spent the whole day wandering the icy streets. The bedrooms at the inn were very warm because the windows had two panes of glass in them, but even beside the stove she could not bake away her chill.
The next day, Sabine refused to leave the kitchen. She stirred puddings, eating half the mixture, her stomach tight as a drum from being fed too much. She made endless paper chains of dollies, regularly decapitating them with scissors her hostess had blunted specially for her use. Lore, who in Hamburg was never still, sat motionless in the bedroom.
“Did Father Salomon say anything?”
“He knows nothing. I can tell that he believes the worst.”
Then she did not speak at all. When she went away from him like this, Nicolai felt so lonely. He needed to do something; inactivity made him itch.
“It’s stopped snowing. We could take a walk. I’ll bring the camera and take some more pictures for you to keep.”
She shook her head.
She was a double reflection in the glass and so was he. Everybody had an inner and an outer self. Everyone led a double life in the real world; as children grew, they built an outer shell for themselves. The inner person was tender and had to be protected. The trick to staying alive seemed to be to make the gap between the outside pane and the inner one as narrow as possible. He saw that if the gap was too big, as it was for Lore, a person might perish inside that void.
ELEVEN
Marseilles, January 1941
Ilse suffered with violent stomachache and cramps. She had never felt so ill. When the blood flowed, she understood. La Petite Louise showed her how to make up the pads of cloth and attach them to an elastic belt with safety pins; she told her to wash them out in cold water, never hot.
“How old are you, Schätzchen?”
“Fifteen in March.”
“High time you became a woman.”
In the night she felt feverish. Then Renée was there, pulling the tangled sheets straight. For a long time the big woman sat holding a damp cloth to her forehead. Ilse did not want to move. She could have lain in that position forever, held in place by Renée’s firm hands.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” she said, “about the exit visa.” The big hands pressed down. Since her father was taken, she had said this often. “No, child, it’s nobody’s fault. In war things happen. We’ll find him and get him back.”
Her father, moved from one place to another, was still in France. They knew that because, though three months had passed, his name never appeared on the weekly list of deportees.
“But what if the authorities find out that he’s the one who wrote the pamphlets?”
“Otto won’t tell them. Your father’s a veteran when it comes to prisons. He’ll have kept his mouth shut. That’s the first thing they teach them in the underground.” Perhaps Renée was part of the underground too. In the dark her voice sounded different, dampened; they were both depressed. Ilse had known about the gun. She was to blame: she should have taken it and dropped it in the harbour.
She was not a woman. She was a child, alone, wanting Willy, wanting Albert, wanting her parents. In dreams, she climbed the hill in Cassis, knocked at the unyielding house until her hands turned into hammers. An evil old witch barred the door, but Ilse pushed her aside, insisting on going in. Laughter came from behind a door; Albert had only been hiding. He cooked fish, laid sardines in a perfect row alternating heads and tails on a green plate. She typed at the kitchen table. The words came out beautifully even but, like the fish, every other one was upside down. This made his text impossible to read. Albert grew angry and accusing. The book would never be finished because of her mistakes. She woke in a sweat of anxiety, lonelier than ever, and stared sightlessly at the blackout, waiting for the first faint shimmer of day, remembering.
It had been her first impulse to go to Cassis. Albert would know what to do. Faintly alarmed when the door was opened by an old woman, Ilse had stayed, irresolute, in the doorway, unable to believe that he was not there.
“Where did the monsieur go? When did he leave?”
“Last week.”
“Are you sure?”
The old woman had shrugged, as if to say she could not understand it either.
“Come and see for yourself, Mademoiselle.”
She walked from room to room. There was no trace of Albert. Fear clutched her that he, too, had been taken away.
“No police came, nobody from the military?” asked Ilse in a whisper.
“No, Mademoiselle.”
Perhaps the old woman with her hooded eyes had known more than she had said. Perhaps Albert had received his visa for America: that was the only explanation that calmed her. It seemed incredible that he would have left France so abruptly without saying goodbye. Perhaps it was a decision he made because of his book, a good decision. Nothing lessened the feeling of desolation. Nightly, the bad dreams returned.
Renée continued to search for Otto, but Ilse knew not to have hope. She trailed most days to the poste restante, where nobody knew whether letters sent abroad were delivered or not. Everything went through the German authorities. All correspondence was in any case limited to preprinted postcards on which you crossed out words and filled in blanks: . . . in good health . . . tired . . . slightly / seriously ill, wounded . . . killed . . . prisoner . . . died . . . without news of . . . in need of supplies / money / . . . is working in / is going to / is being put up at. She sent three of these carefully worded, official postcards to Toni, saying that she was “in good health” but “my father” was a prisoner; she signed them “your friend.” No answer came.
Her parents had disappeared out of the world; they existed only in dark places in her head. When her father tried to come into her dreams she woke at once, terrified of what he might accuse her of. In these slow hours her wickedness lay heavily in the corners of the room. She had disobeyed him and as a consequence had lost both him and Albert. She had challenged Otto to bring her to safety and here was the evil result. Often she had woken to his snores and, turning sharply, had pressed the pillow over her head to shut them out, longing for a bed of her own. His absence oppressed Ilse far more than his rasping breathing. She would not lie in the centre in sole occupancy, for that meant he would never come back. Again and again, she shifted over just a few millimetres. Because the mattress sagged in the centre, she had to be vigilant. The old bedstead creaked its protest. On these bitter winter mornings it would not grow light for hours.
Without Otto, she was losing her sense of her mother. Even when they did not speak of her, Mutti had continued to exist in her full strength between them. Her careful mother had made an irretrievable error in imagining that her father would send her back. If only she had joined them in Paris. If only she had realised how much Vati loved her. Love was a more powerful force than she had imagined. “Mutti,” she whispered, “what do I do? How shall I ever find you now?” Dry-eyed, she stared at the ceiling, waiting for the drab day.
The girls felt sorry for her. They had a jacket made for her, a poor relation to the beautiful coat Willy had bought her, now outgrown, the nap worn bare. The wool substitute material they clubbed together to buy was thin and scratchy. It absorbed water when it rain
ed and never recovered its shape.
“Look at your tits,” said La Petite. “That miserable dress is so skimpy it’s indecent.”
“You should know,” snapped Ilse, then bit her tongue. What was wrong, that she was so bad-tempered? They found her some underwear. The brassiere they offered was pink satin. Tart’s underwear. She would have preferred something white, something simpler. Ilse knew that she should be grateful but it was too hard.
“Raymond has got us a man,” said Renée. “Un drôle de mec” she called him. That meant an oddity. “A bit of a maniac,” she said. “He knows his way round the camps.” He would find Otto.
“How do you know he’s to be trusted?”
“I’ve met him, he’s not a stranger. He’s been here a few times before. This one’s not the usual type that’ll do anything for money. He’s more sophisticated. And he speaks German, so he’ll be able to talk to Otto. His speciality is getting people out of France.”
“Have you warned him about Vati? About his work?”
“Don’t worry. That’s a recommendation to this fellow. They’re on the same side.”
The knock at her door woke her.
“You’ve got a visitor.” It was Raymond’s voice. Scrambling into her clothes to unbolt the door, Ilse had an oblique view of a very tall young man with jet-black hair, his head bowed. The stranger smiled. His eyes were so incredibly blue. She stared at the drôle de mec who was going to find her father.
“I’ll stay out here, keep an eye on things,” said Raymond, shutting the door on them.
“Keep an eye on the girls, he means,” said François. “What a bad memory you have, don’t you know me?”
She nodded. He took her hand and kept it, turning it over to look at the long scars along the fleshy part of the thumb. Dismayed, Ilse found herself blushing a bright red.
“Did you do what I said?”
Still she could not speak.
“The wound has healed nicely.”
“My father—” She was stammering.
“I know. Madame Renée has told me everything. I am going to try and help you.”
The Children's War Page 24