Two days after she had left Trieste, the train from Warsaw crossed the border into the Free City of Danzig. Hannah was almost at the end of her journey. There had been three months of silence from Ireland as far as Susan Field was concerned. She knew from her father that Brian Field had been to Pearse Street to see Inspector Donaldson several times. There were no developments. The police in Germany had been contacted about the whereabouts of Hugo Keller, with no results. As Keller was an Austrian citizen they assumed he must be in Austria. No one knew whether the police in Vienna had been contacted. None of it was surprising, and Hannah didn’t need to be there to hear what went unspoken. The choices Susan Field had made were not the choices any decent woman would even contemplate. She was an unsolved murder, but the Gardaí weren’t looking for a solution, any more than they had looked for an explanation when she first disappeared.
At Christmas Hannah did believe Stefan Gillespie really would find out what had happened to her friend. Perhaps he would have done, despite the doors that were slammed in his face. But he had his own problems. She didn’t know everything, but she was aware that he had been close to losing his job. He had written once, early in January. She knew he was sitting on a hillside in West Wicklow, fighting to stop his son being taken away, because of what he thought or what he didn’t think, because of who he was, and who his parents and grandparents were. He was probably very new to that. She wasn’t. It came as easily and familiarly as breathing. Stefan had been in her mind a lot since she’d left Ireland. During those three months in Europe she had come close to contacting him several times. Sometimes she told herself it was only because Susan’s death was still there, still unresolved, but there were other reasons, and they had as much to do with what was unresolved in her own life as with her friend’s murder. However, she had made decisions about her life that she couldn’t change. It was too late now. She would be back in Palestine soon. She didn’t know when she would return to Europe or to Ireland. Perhaps she never would. But there was still the debt of love she owed her friend. It wasn’t enough that Susan’s death was forgotten. She knew where Francis Byrne was; Stefan Gillespie had told her that much. And if no one could find Hugo Keller, she would at least find the priest.
It was late when Hannah arrived in Danzig. The train had few passengers. When she had crossed the border, the flags were the flags of the Free City, a bright, cheerful red with a crown and two white crosses. The policeman who gave her passport a cursory glance wore the same insignia on his uniform. She had travelled on in the darkness, too tired to do anything other than stare at her reflection in the glass of the carriage, yet not tired enough to sleep. She had no expectations of the city. Danzig had its problems, she knew that, but it wasn’t Germany. Yet it was still a journey no one would want her to make. It would irritate Benny; it was all too personal. But in the end he would understand, at least he would do what he did when she annoyed him – say nothing. Sometimes a show of anger from him would have made her feel less patronised. But all that was for another day now.
When she stepped off the train at Danzig Hauptbahn, the flag of the Free City was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t Germany; it was supposed to be another country, but every platform was draped with swastikas. And as she walked out to the station forecourt, the men standing around the Imbiss stall, eating bratwurst and drinking beer, wore the brown uniform of the Nazi SA. They were the first stormtroopers she had seen outside a newsreel.
*
The dining room of the Hotel Danziger Hof was noisy with breakfast. It had been almost empty when Hannah Rosen entered, but almost immediately it started to fill up. There was a crowd at the door now, waiting for tables. She sat by a window, looking out at the Hohe Tor, the High Gate, a great blockhouse of bricks pierced by an arch, once the main gate through the city’s encircling fortifications. The walls had been demolished to make room for the modern city, though as modern cities went Danzig wore its antiquity with pride. Once it had been an independent city-state, and it had maintained that independent spirit through the centuries of war that sucked it in and out of the kingdoms of Poland and Prussia. A hundred and fifty years ago the city had fought to remain part of a Poland that guaranteed both its autonomy and its Germanness, in the face of a Prussian juggernaut that had no use for any kind of Germanness other than its own. But that was long forgotten. Beyond the window of the Danziger Hof, in front of the Hohe Tor, was the statue of a man on a horse, wearing a spiked helmet; Kaiser Wilhelm, the first emperor of the unified Germany that had incorporated Danzig into its territory for barely fifty years before the First World War, finally sweeping away its cantankerous independence in a great tide of all-embracing Germanness. Now the Free City of Danzig stood on its own again, a tiny statelet, barely the size of Wicklow, locked in by Poland in the west and south and by German East Prussia to the east. The Free City was the creation of a fledgling League of Nations whose high democratic ideals sat uneasily with the city’s new purpose: to punish Germany for a world war and to pacify Poland. At the heart of the Free City, the League’s High Commissioner fought with the only weapons available to him, little more than good-humour and patience, to defend a democracy almost everyone in the city-state seemed to despise. The last thing German Danzig wanted was to be free again. It was typical of the city’s bloody-mindedness that having regained its ancient independence, most of its inhabitants dreamt only of disappearing back into the all-consuming sea of Germany once more.
‘The Free State of Danzig was involuntarily severed from Germany on January 10th, 1920 by the Treaty of Versailles.’ Hannah read from the guide book she had found in her room. She had brought it with her for the map, but she was grateful that it gave her something to do now. ‘In the face of all force the city has defended its German character through the ages; its very architecture speaks of German character, German art and German will.’ A tour of historical Danzig was the last thing on Hannah’s mind, but The Important Sights of Danzig, along with the view of the Kaiser’s statue and the Hohe Tor, at least kept her eyes from the busy dining room she wished she had walked straight past when she came down from her room. She was uneasy. She would drink her coffee as quickly as she could. She would eat whatever came. Or if it took much longer she would just leave anyway.
The tables were almost entirely full of men, businessmen, salesmen, politicians, journalists. In a few days Danzig would vote for a new parliament. The expectation was that the ruling Nazi Party would win, very comfortably, the overall majority it needed to change the constitution, dispose of the opposition, kick out the League’s High Commissioner, and make this the last election the city would ever see. The road to reunification with Germany would follow; Hitler had already set a pattern for the abolition of democracy by democratic means. Danzig would be next.
Dotted everywhere among the dark business suits, contributing loud, excitable, argumentative voices to the buzz of conversation, were the uniforms of Nazism, of the Danzig Party and visiting SA and SS dignitaries from Germany. Hannah hadn’t expected to be thrown so completely into this world. The Nazis had power in Danzig, but there was still a constitution that was meant to stop them abusing it – at least that’s what the English newspapers said. Yet walking the short distance from the station to Dominikswall and the Danziger Hof the night before it didn’t feel like that. The dark streets were lined with the red, white and black of the crooked cross. In Elisabethwall she stopped to ask for directions. When she turned to walk on she saw she was standing in front of a shop selling children’s clothes. The windows were broken. A Star of David was daubed on the door; and the words ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’. The Jews are our misfortune.
She had slept very little that night. She had thought about Stefan. Now she wished he was with her. She told herself it was because he knew what to say, because he would know what was true and what wasn’t, but it was also because she felt he would make her stronger. She hadn’t considered Danzig being another Germany now. She should have done. She read the papers
. Sometimes she could be too single-minded to think things through; her mother always said that. But when her mother said it there was usually something to laugh about. Now she was having breakfast in a room full of Nazis. She felt people were looking at her, and they were. There were other women in the dining room, but she was the only one on her own, fair game for businessmen and reps with nothing better to do. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but now she was starting to feel she couldn’t breathe. A tall SS man was trying to catch her eye. He had been looking at her since he came in.
She got up abruptly, just as the waiter arrived with a basket of bread and pastries, beaming his regrets about how busy it was. He fussed over her, full of kind, concerned apologies, telling her the bread was still warm from the oven, but only drawing more attention to her with his paean to the pastries. She smiled awkwardly, mumbling something about being late, and left. As she passed the SS man caught her eye again; this time he winked.
Irritated by the sense of panic that had started to envelop her, she focused firmly on the concierge’s instructions. She walked quickly away from the hotel. Boys from the Hitler Youth were giving out election leaflets on the pavement. In Kohlenmarkt a column of teenage girls in brown dresses, two-by-two, moved across the square, singing a German folk song, so beautiful that she stopped and stared, almost forgetting where she was. The girl at the front carried a swastika pennant. Hannah could see a Number 2 tram, waiting. She ran to catch it. She felt more relaxed now, grateful for the rattling of the tram. Movement had become important to her in the last few months. A train, a boat, even a few moments on a tram. Everything was easier when she was moving. The tram ran along Stadtgraben, past the station. On the left, the green wooded hills of the Hagelsberg rose up above the city. She thought that in a different time she might have liked this place. Her grandfather had come from Lithuania; it wasn’t so far away across the Baltic. She tried to remember the stories he had told her; the journey that brought him out of Russia to Ireland, through Germany and Holland and England. Hadn’t the boat stopped here? She was sure it had. The journey started on a boat, she knew that. She looked down at the map. The tram was moving out of the city, through the Langfuhr suburbs to Oliva and Zoppot. A line of linden trees stretched ahead. She would see the Baltic Sea soon. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that she would see Father Francis Byrne.
All of a sudden the people sitting around her on the tram got up and moved to one side, crowding at the windows and looking out. She didn’t get up, but she looked. She had been too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the groups of people along the road, watching, waiting, holding swastikas. She could see flags waving now. People were cheering. The passengers on the tram started applauding as they gazed out through the windows. She could see a line of black cars coming the other way, heading into the city. There was an open Mercedes-Benz. A big man in an elaborately belted and bemedalled uniform sat in the back, smiling and waving at the crowds. She recognised Herman Goering from newspapers and newsreels, even in the seconds it took the car to pass. The hotel manager had told her as she checked in; he was flying from Berlin to speak at an election rally. The tram passengers were shouting. ‘Germany! Danzig back to Germany!’ In the Danziger Hof she felt panic; what she felt now was the cold sweat of fear.
She left the tram at Oliva and walked through the quiet park that led to the cathedral. Behind her was the Baltic Sea and the resort of Zoppot. Ahead the hills rose up again, thickly forested, dark even in the spring sunlight. The path led her through landscaped gardens and neat groves of trees. It was a place of carefully tended calm. There were no flags, no uniforms. The city seemed a long way away here. Two gardeners greeted her as she passed. Though the greeting was German they spoke in Polish as she walked past.
She asked for Father Byrne at the office opposite the cathedral. The secretary spoke some English and was keen to use it. Father Byrne was doing confessions in English now, but he would be finished any time. When the woman discovered Hannah was from Ireland she struggled to find the English words to tell her how pleased he would be to see her, then gave up and told her in German anyway. Hannah needed all the ignorance of German she could muster to curb the woman’s enthusiasm and persuade her not to come with her across the square to find the priest. She hurried out quickly.
She stood for a moment, looking up at the two red-brick towers, topped with copper spires, blue-green against a sky that was very clear now. The sun was warm in the sheltered square in front of the cathedral. She felt she wanted to stay a little longer in the light of this place she didn’t know, unsure what finally arriving meant. She steeled herself and walked on.
As she entered the cathedral she expected it to be dark. Instead it was full of light. There was colour everywhere. Stretching along either side of the narrow chancel were dozens of carved and painted altars. It was silent and empty and its beauty briefly stilled the noises in her head. There was a deep smell of old wood and centuries of incense. The only great churches she had been into were St Patrick’s in Dublin and Westminster Abbey in London. They were history lessons in stone. This was a softer place. She could feel the faith that made all its ornateness something simple and reassuring. The almost random confusion of colour and light was a perfection no one had ever set out to create, but there it was. It was everything a synagogue wasn’t. Judaism was a faith that rested in words. It had no truck with all this, decoration piled on decoration. Yet it wasn’t so different. She didn’t often think of the psalms she had heard sung every Saturday of her life as a child, but they spoke of the wild places of the spirit, and in that wilderness they imposed order and peace. These were the words, the same words somehow, in brick and stone. There was a calm here that almost seemed to drain away her purpose. But suddenly that intrusive calm was gone. She saw the priest.
He emerged from one of the wooden confessionals and unhooked a small sign from the door. ‘Father Byrne English Confessions.’ He walked through a line of pews and genuflected in front of the high altar, then moved towards the main door where she was standing. He smiled as he approached. ‘Guten morgen.’ ‘Good morning, Father,’ she answered. He caught her accent easily in those few words. And he was pleased to hear it. He wasn’t very tall. His hair was fair, almost blond. Hannah remembered Susan saying it made him look younger than he was, even though it had started to recede. It was a boy’s hair. She’d said his eyes were very bright. They didn’t look so bright to Hannah. Far from looking younger than he was, he looked older.
‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Are you Father Byrne?’
There was an intensity in the way she was looking at him that made him very uncomfortable almost straight away. But he smiled pleasantly.
‘I am. Is it a holiday then?’
‘I came to see you.’ There was no lightness in her voice. He didn’t know what to make of her. It was as if there was an accusation in her eyes.
‘Well, I’m glad you did. I just wondered why you were in Danzig.’
‘I was a friend of Susan Field’s.’ She spoke the words softly.
He looked at her with an expression of almost pained bewilderment. It was as if he had to think hard to understand what she meant before he could answer. Hannah said nothing. She just waited. The next words had to be his.
‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed even older as he said the words.
It wasn’t much. She could see he knew it wasn’t enough.
‘I heard, of course. It’s a terrible loss.’
Hannah’s presence really was an accusation; she could see that he felt that. Her eyes didn’t move from his. She could see how much he wanted to look away too. They stood there, looking at one another, for only a few seconds, but the priest seemed frozen. Something was happening behind his eyes, something painful was forcing itself into his head, from the dark corner where he had pushed it. But he said nothing.
‘I want to know why she’s dead. You must know something!’ She blurted out the words. ‘I want
to know what happened to her.’
‘What happened.’ He repeated her words slowly, not a question, not a statement, but as if they were in a language he didn’t know very well.
‘Nine months ago she went to Merrion Square for an abortion –’
‘Please, I’m sure you know where you are!’ he whispered, leaning in towards her, his eyes darting nervously now, as if he was being watched.
‘I do, and I know who you are.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know you were the father of her child and I know you made the arrangements with the doctor, Mr Keller. Susan wrote to me about you.’
He was calmer now. He had never seen her before, but he had realised who she was. He didn’t know her, yet he felt as if he did. He had heard too much about her from Susan not to. There was only one person she could be.
‘You’re Hannah.’
‘Yes.’
‘You could only be Hannah.’ There was a smile on his lips. It surprised her, not because it was a smile, but because it was tender. There was a memory, and somewhere, in a way she didn’t understand, it mattered to him. As they walked out of the cathedral he put the sign he was carrying down on a table by the door. ‘Father Byrne Confessions in English.’
The City of Shadows Page 21