The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “Franca Palmer is addicted to pills, Mum. She takes strong anti-anxiety meds. She has an anxiety disorder and panic attacks. You could treat her. You’d be a wonderful therapist. ”

  Beatrice looked over at Franca. “How you could pick her up of all people is a mystery to me. She has nothing at all in common with the women you usually bring home.”

  “I told you already, it was a coincidence. She more or less fell into my car. Look after her! Maybe she’ll be more thankful for your efforts than I am.”

  He turned around and walked off, making a show as he went reaching for another glass of champagne. He stopped when he got over to where Helene and Maya were and began a monolog, accompanied by somewhat nervous gestures.

  “Idiot boy,” Beatrice said emphatically. That was it for her. She had no desire to stay any longer at a party that could only make her angrier. Maybe she should snatch the poor dormouse Franca Palmer from her corner and talk her into a quick turn around the garden. She was interested in learning more about the woman that Alan had picked up and brought home. Even if they had only met each other by chance, still there must have been something about her captivating enough that he’d offered to help her. Maybe something could come of it. Beatrice would have given a fortune to prize her son from the grips of the impossible Maya Ashworth. She figured it couldn’t hurt to take a closer look at the young German woman.

  Besides, she wanted to go outside anyway. It was a glorious, hot summer day, but it was typical of Helene to stay in the house and in so doing to force her guests to miss out on the sun as well. Helene simply always complained about the weather. It was either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Beatrice hadn’t once seen her content.

  She grabbed two glasses of champagne and went up to Franca. She had no desire to look on any longer while Helene had others celebrate her and Alan fawned over Maya. And got ever more drunk in the process. No more than two hours from now he wouldn’t even know his own name.

  4

  “I was reading an interesting book today,” said Franca. “It’s an account written by a man who lived through the German occupation of the English Channel Islands.”

  “So?” Michael shot back, tired and unenthusiastic. It was late in the evening. He’d had a stressful day. He’d meant to be in bed some time ago, but now he was too exhausted to pick himself up, climb the stairs, undress and brush his teeth. So instead he sat slumped at the kitchen table, clutching a glass of red wine. Franca sat across from him, more present and less frustrated than usual. The September night air came in through an open window, still velvety warm and smooth, and an odd calm lay over the house — odd because it held a certain secret, seemed to conceal a vague promise, a promise of change.

  A night with the promise of something, Franca thought. Probably just one of my dumb feelings … it’s a good bet Michael doesn’t feel anything of the sort.

  It seemed like an eternity since they’d last sat together like this: tired and drinking wine, neither expecting anything from the other. Every once in awhile one of them would speak, then they were silent again. This silence, however, was free from the crippling disquiet that usually came over Franca. Maybe it was because Michael was so clearly tired. She didn’t need to fear one of his attacks. He wasn’t as sharp-tongued after working hard and then having something to drink. The moment reminded Franca of the beginning of their relationship, when things had been better between them. There had been times back then when they’d sat together like this in their run-down student flat in Kreuzberg. They had drunk cheap wine that tasted awful and gave them headaches, and they had loved it all the same.

  Their estrangement had crept in slowly, feeding off Franca’s professional setbacks and the doubt and depression that had grown inside her as a result. It had fed off Michael’s career as well, his striving to make more and more money, the mania with which he’d pursued his goals and then achieved them. The gulf between them had grown wider and wider. Eventually, each of them seemed to stand on his or her own separate hill, without connection to each other, a chasm between them that nothing could bridge. Hardly any communication had been possible between them.

  “You remember I told you about the woman I stayed with on Guernsey,” Franca went on. She spoke too quickly, but the moment held a certain calm and intimacy that she was determined to put to good use. “Beatrice Shaye. She lives there together with another older woman, a German. Helene Feldmann. Beatrice speaks perfect German as a result.”

  “That was good for you. Means you didn’t have to belabor your English,” Michael said somewhat disinterestedly. He yawned. “God, I am tired! I should have gone to bed a long time ago.”

  “German was mandatory in all the schools on the Channel Islands during the German occupation in the Second World War,” said Franca. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “At the time, Helene Feldmann went over to Guernsey as the wife of an officer in the occupation force. They commandeered the house where Beatrice lived. Her parents had fled. She grew up with the Feldmanns.”

  “I really don’t get what it is you find so interesting about these people,” said Michael. “They’re completely normal people whom you have nothing to do with. You’ll never see them again.”

  “I’ll have to go back to Guernsey for you again.”

  “Yes, but naturally you’ll be staying at the hotel! This room in — what’s the name again? Le Variouf or something like that? — was an emergency solution. In the future you won’t set foot in that backwater!”

  “In the book I’m reading about the war on the Channel Islands,” Franca doggedly returned to the beginning of their conversation, “Erich Feldmann is also mentioned. First he was a major, then during the war he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He was responsible for the transportation of building materials for the island — you know, the things they needed to build fortifications and all the underground bunkers. But of course that meant he was dealing with the captive laborers. The author of the book describes him as having a completely unpredictable personality. He could totally abandon himself to his good mood and call for special rations for the workers, and then in the next moment he could turn into a slave driver. He dealt out draconian punishments and tended to turn tyrant whenever he needed an outlet for his rage.”

  “There were tons of people like that back then,” said Michael. “The Third Reich brought all these closet sadists out from where they’d been hiding and pushed them out in the open. They could finally live out their urges without hindrance, they even got medals for it afterwards. This Erich Feldmann guy was one of thousands.”

  “On his watch there were shootings and mistreatment. All kinds of awful things.”

  “I take it he’s no longer alive?”

  “He died in early May, 1945. Shortly before the surrender of occupation forces on the islands. The circumstances seem a bit unclear, but it seems like everything got lost in the general chaos at the time anyway.”

  “He was probably lynched by the captive laborers, once they were freed,” said Michael. “In any case, I hope he was. But why are you even thinking about such a rotten guy?”

  “I met his widow. I met the woman who lived under the same roof with him as a young girl. I’d like to find out more about all of them.”

  “Go to the archives. Go rummage through documents from back then. Not that there’s any sense in it, but you’ll be busy with something and you won’t be brooding over your neuroses all day. I always used to say that you should be a journalist, or at least try for something in that direction. But then you wanted …”

  “I know. I wanted to come to my own decision, and it was the wrong one, and now I have to live with it. We’ve talked about this often.”

  “You don’t have to live with anything. Everything can be changed.”

  “I’m thirty-four. I …”

  “I�
�ll say it again: Everything can be changed. Sixty-four, eighty-four — you just have to want to. You have to understand that naturally you have to have a bit of will. But will can be learned. Strength can be learned.” He looked at her. In his eyes was a firm resolve.

  This all-defeating power, she thought. This merciless energy. Whenever he looks at me like this I lose whatever small scraps of self-confidence I have left.

  Exhausted, all of a sudden, she said quietly, “That’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to tell you about was …”

  “But we should talk about it.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said stubbornly.

  Michael shook his head. He’d gotten past his weariness and was now wide awake and clear-headed — and therefore dangerous. “You talk like a little girl sometimes. Only a child says simply ‘because’ when she can’t think of an argument. My God, can’t you finally just grow up?”

  “I …”

  “Figuratively speaking, Franca, you’re the kind of person who just stands around twiddling her thumbs. You’ve given up on yourself, and you feel oh so sorry for yourself. Something went wrong for you and now you don’t have the backbone to get up and risk making a fresh start. You lie down on the therapist’s couch and whine, and on top of that you numb yourself with pills that trick you into thinking things are halfway alright. And so you get weaker and weaker …”

  “On Guernsey,” said Franca, her voice now powerless, despairing, “I got by for three full days without the pills.”

  He brushed the comment aside with a surly wave of his hand. “And you see this as some kind of grand accomplishment? There was nothing else for you to do, so you got through it somehow. And not particularly well, judging from all you’ve told me. Didn’t you have to pay — with my money — for a bunch of broken dishes at a restaurant after you’d had a hysterical fit there? To me that doesn’t exactly sound like you’ve suddenly gotten a grip on your addiction.”

  “I didn’t have a hysterical fit. I had a panic attack. You can’t …”

  “You’re splitting hairs! Hysteria, panic … the fact is that there are thousands of women who can go to a restaurant and act completely normal, right? Who can go back out again without leaving half the furniture in pieces behind them!”

  A burning began somewhere behind her eyes. The first sign that tears were starting to well up. He was boundless in his exaggerations, and he was nasty. And it wasn’t just what he said; the way he said what he did made his words even more vicious. Poison arrows, shot with cruelty and precision.

  “I didn’t break all the,” she began, but she broke off mid-sentence. There wasn’t any point, he wouldn’t listen to her. Her therapist had told her that she was far too quick to let herself get on the defensive. “Stop defending yourself all the time! A child stands there and justifies her actions. Or the guilty party in a courtroom. You are neither. You are an adult woman who does not have to constantly be giving excuses to any and all for the way she behaves.”

  She doesn’t know Michael, she thought, she doesn’t know his accusations and attacks and abuses. She doesn’t know about feeling like you’re pinned to the wall, arms and legs flailing helplessly.

  “And as for your research on this Erich Feldmann,” Michael went on, his tone leaving no doubt as to how senseless and frivolous he found her interest in a dead Nazi officer, “that’ll wind up going nowhere too. It’s an absolute waste of time to concern yourself with it. But like I already said, it would have kept you from spinning circles inside your head twenty-four hours a day. And if you were to actually go to an archive or to a library, then that’d at least be something different from always just sitting at home and sinking deeper and deeper into your phobias about other people and the entire outside world. But do you want me to tell you something? You won’t do it! You won’t get one step past the door, never mind getting all the way to someplace in public. You can’t even come visit me at the office anymore. You can’t go to the supermarket sometimes. You’re overestimating yourself endlessly with this notion of yours. But maybe it makes you feel good to come up with these daydreams that will never reach fulfillment.”

  He’d whipped himself into a rage saying this. His voice had become very loud and violent. Franca recognized the fury smoldering within him, all the anger that had been building up inside him over the years. Of course he was fed up with the situation. A successful, good-looking man, owner of a large manufacturer of dental equipment, culturally and socially engaged — stuck with a wife who could barely leave the house on account of her fears and obsessions, who couldn’t entertain and couldn’t accompany him anywhere. A woman who was becoming increasingly dull; who sat around in the same shapeless clothes; who didn’t even have the confidence to go out and have her hair died or wear a dress that didn’t hang past her ankles. He longed for another partner, she knew. For a woman with whom he could truly share his life.

  “All the same,” she said softly, “I still flew to Guernsey again on my own.”

  Michael raised both hands in the air in a mock gesture of thanks. “You flew to Guernsey! Again! Let us praise the lord for spreading his wings over you and protecting you on this dangerous adventure. What a drama it was getting you on that plane! You cried for days before you left. Excuses. Panic. And then the fiasco of you discovering that you’d left without your pills. And that you didn’t have a room. Jesus, I thought the world was ending! But you’d only flown to Guernsey. To do me a small favor. And by the way,” he added somewhat more calmly, but at the same time more coldly, “you were doing yourself a favor as well. It’s not a bad life you lead, thanks to that money.”

  “I went for four days without pills. In a foreign country. Among strangers. I withstood a severe panic attack without medication. Does that count for nothing at all?”

  He drank the last bit of wine in his glass and stood up. He had himself under control. He wouldn’t start in with any more pointed attacks tonight. But that didn’t mean he would be friendly or conciliatory — not for a long time.

  “Please don’t expect any recognition from me just because this one time you weren’t as blatantly bonkers as usual,” he said wearily. “I can’t give it to you. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m not going to pretend for your benefit that things are one way when they’re not. I can’t understand you or your problems anymore. I can’t listen to your explanations, your justifications and excuses and the miniscule success stories that never lead to a larger success, but are just brief flashes of light in a dark tunnel. I can’t give you what you’re expecting. I can’t stroke your hair and say, ‘Well done, Franca! What progress! I’m so proud of you!’ I’m not proud of you. Not of anything that you say or do. I have always hated weakness. Maybe that’s not a good character trait, but I am how I am. Why should I act like I’m somebody different?” He turned and left the kitchen. His steps echoed off the stone tiles in the hallway. The staircase creaked as he went upstairs.

  She stared at the whitewashed door he’d closed behind him. He hadn’t slammed it shut; in the end he’d no longer been furious. Just exhausted, and resigned. Perhaps his rage would have been easier to deal with. The calm with which he’d told her of his loathing hurt her more than she could say. He hadn’t spoken in the heat of the moment. He hadn’t flung words at her that didn’t mean all that much; that he just had to get rid of as a way of letting out his aggression, but that he’d later say — and think — that he hadn’t meant in that way. What he had just said, he had meant. His words would hold true not just for now but for the days and weeks to come.

  This is the bottom, she thought. She was cold, and she felt an odd calm. This is the bottom. He can’t hurt me any worse than this. No one can hurt me any worse than this.

  In the stillness, she listened, gripped suddenly by the irrational notion that something about that night had t
o have changed, now that so many unspeakable things had been said. But nothing had changed. The clock ticked over the refrigerator. The refrigerator itself softly hummed. Somewhere in the distance, it had to have been a few streets away, a car started. Right afterwards a dog started barking, but was quiet again almost immediately. It was a calm, warm night.

  Maybe I won’t live that much longer, she thought. It was a beautiful, comforting thought.

  5

  September 15, 1999

  Dear Beatrice,

  I hope my letter doesn’t come as a nuisance. But it was so nice for me to spend three days in your home — in the quiet of a charming village, in the beauty of a wild, romantic landscape. I wanted to thank your son for helping me on that horrible day in St. Peter Port and for taking me to stay with you. I would not have been capable of finding something on my own. Unfortunately, I don’t know his address in London. Would you please pass my thanks along to him? That would be very nice of you.

  It was wonderful that I could be there for your birthday. I enjoyed going for a walk with you in your large garden and learning a little about yours and Helene Feldmann’s past. You must have gone through a lot if you were on Guernsey throughout all of the occupation. Since then, I’ve educated myself a bit more about the way things were back then — my knowledge of these things was limited only to what I’d learned in school, and even that was buried deep in the back of my mind. One learns — if one is at all interested in this kind of thing — quite a bit about what went on in occupied France, in Holland and Poland and wherever else, but almost nothing is said about the Channel Islands. Forgotten territories. Literally, by the wayside, right? I’ve read that the Allies left them behind when they landed at Normandy, and while they liberated Europe piece by piece, there the islands sat, in the middle of the sea, still under occupation, and no one seemed to be thinking about them or their fate.