The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  In the book, a factual account of that time on Guernsey, there’s also mention of Erich Feldmann, Helene’s husband. He doesn’t come off particularly well, the way he’s described. I would be interested to know what he was like in everyday life — at home, alone with you and Helene.

  If you feel that I and my curiosity are too meddlesome, simply leave this letter unanswered.

  Sincerely yours, Franca Palmer

  6

  September 22, 1999

  Dear Franca,

  I don’t think you’re meddlesome at all! I just think it strange that you’re interested in these things. You’re a young woman, I’d guess you’re in your early- to mid-thirties. Whenever I try to speak with younger people about those times, they start to yawn and they get this despairing look about them like they’re hoping I’ll finish up telling these old stories as quickly as possible. At best they politely feign interest, when the truth is they’re not interested at all. I’m old enough that I notice at once when someone is just putting on an act for me.

  Maybe with Germans it’s somewhat different: Because of your history, you Germans must always have an open ear for anything having to do with that time. It’s all part of the atonement you must do. It’s been imposed on you for generations to come. You can’t just say: it’s all one to me, not interested!

  Or do young people in Germany also do that? I’ve never been there, and I don’t have any contact with German tourists on Guernsey. So I really have no clue about tendencies of this sort.

  Erich Feldmann is mentioned in a book? It’s good that his crimes have been — I hope! — documented. Yes, I had the pleasure of spending five years in the house of a psychologically imbalanced man whose broken soul found expression all too often in unpredictable bouts of sadism.

  Although, actually, it was the other way around. He lived in my house. He had taken possession of it. He spread out inside like a large, fast-growing weed that slowly robs all the other plants around it of room to live and air to breathe. His needs were all that mattered. Always, and without exception. In another time he might have been a mid-level officer, someone who only tyrannized his family and a few subordinates. Unfortunately, the National Socialist regime gave him a much broader reach, together with an abundance of power and a full array of deadly tools to work with. There were people over whom he had the power of life and death. He made use of this position for good and for ill. Both gave him satisfaction: giving the thumbs up, and also letting it fall.

  I knew very little about any of it though. I experienced what he was like at home, and as I was a child and the house was my world, I didn’t look too far beyond its borders. Nevertheless, I feel that the image of him I’ve pieced together over the years is fairly accurate.

  At the time I wouldn’t have been able to say what feelings he aroused in me. Hate, affection, gratitude, fear … his moods changed faster than the patterns in the clouds when a gale blows in from the sea. Today I believe that hatred was the dominant feeling. Hatred towards a man who sometimes would force a fatherly affection on me, but who would inevitably disappoint me if ever I took his claims of sympathy seriously, if ever I began, however tentatively, to count on them. Yes, in the end it was probably just hatred …

  GUERNSEY, JUNE 1940

  But in that first moment he had appeared before her like a guardian angel. She had been so afraid. She had been so alone, and so hungry. For two days, airplanes had flown in circles over the island, and the droning of their motors had put Beatrice in a state of panic. She spent the whole time in the living room, cowering between the floral-print sofa and the rocking chair, unable to move. Even when the hunger and the thirst became almost unbearable, she couldn’t find the strength to go to the kitchen and find something to eat or to drink. It was as if her legs were paralyzed. She had travelled the entire way from St. Peter Port back home by foot, hour after hour, had run for long stretches and then slowly kept going forward, panting, gasping for air. Finally she had made her way up the hill, crawling on all fours. She had crawled into the living room, had begun to tremble and hadn’t been able to stop.

  Those first few days — how many was it? A couple of days, a week? — she had crawled into the kitchen now and again, had grabbed an apple or a crust of bread and drunk a few sips of water, and then afterwards had immediately gone back to her nest in the living room and huddled up like a small, frightened animal. Ever since the airplanes had begun flying overhead, she hadn’t left her corner at all. She knew that something terrible would happen and that no one was there to help her. She waited and thought she might die.

  When the strange man suddenly appeared before her, she was no longer capable even of shock. She stared at him with something like indifference. He wore a gray uniform and tall, black leather boots. He had taken off his hat and was holding it in his hand. He was very tall and didn’t look all that dangerous.

  “Who do we have here!” He asked. He spoke English, but his accent sounded funny. He was certainly not an Englishman. “What’s your name, little one?”

  She wasn’t sure if she could make a sound. She wasn’t even sure if her muscles functioned well enough for her to manage to move her lips and tongue. But in fact she was able to speak.

  “Beatrice.” It sounded like a small bird was chirping. “Beatrice Stewart.”

  “I see. Beatrice. Wouldn’t you like to come out from your corner? It is so hard for me to speak with you when you’re lying half under a chair and I can hardly see your face.”

  She nodded and tried to stand, but her legs began shaking again at once, and she collapsed. Without hesitation the strange man bent over her. She felt herself taken up by powerful arms and lifted into the air. There was a bitter smell that she found pleasant — it was probably just aftershave, but a better kind than the one her father always used. The strange man set her down on the sofa then disappeared for a moment, and when he came back he was holding a glass of water.

  “Drink this,” he said. “I don’t know how long you’ve been sitting under there, but you seem rather weak to me. Is there anything to eat here in the house?”

  She drank the water in small sips. Eating would be impossible, she could tell.

  “I’m … not hungry,” she murmured.

  He sat down on a chair across from her. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Eleven.”

  “I see. And where are your parents?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone. Where did they go?”

  She had emptied the glass. A few faint first signs of life returned. Her legs no longer felt quite so much like pudding, and she assumed that she’d soon be able to stand on them again.

  “On the ship,” she said. “They went away on the ship.”

  “Evacuated. Yes, they evacuated over twenty thousand people from the islands,” said the man. He added, astonished, “and you’re parents left you behind?”

  Throughout all this time, Beatrice hadn’t cried. It was as if she’d been frozen, she’d felt nothing moving within her. But now all of a sudden something tightened around her throat. It seemed to her that a torrent of tears was waiting to burst out of her.

  Of course Deborah and Andrew, her parents, hadn’t left her behind. They could never have imagined doing something like that. It had been an accident.

  “They made it onto a ship,” she said. “And I didn’t.”

  The man nodded, concerned, full of understanding. “You got separated in the crowd,” he guessed.

  She nodded. She would never forget the impenetrable crowd around the ships, would never forget the harbor in St. Peter Port, which had been black with people. Beatrice hadn’t at all understood why she should leave her pretty garden on this clear, warm June day and climb aboard an overcrowded ship. Deborah had tried to explain. “It could be that the Germans try to take over our islands. People say they could be
here very soon. Whoever is able to should leave the island. We’ll be taken to England.”

  Beatrice had always wanted to see England. Especially London, since Deborah, who had grown up there, had always spoken so fondly of the city. But for some reason, she wasn’t able to be happy about this unexpected trip. Everything had gone so fast; even beforehand there had been a strange feeling in the air. Everyone had been listening to the radio morning and night. Everyone wore serious, worried expressions, and whenever they gathered together people would stand around and talk, talk, talk …

  Beatrice heard that France had been invaded by the Germans, and since this obviously frightened the grown ups, it frightened her, too. The coast of Brittany was close by — all too close. The Germans had to be dangerous, that much became clear to her. The name “Hitler” floated around like an evil spirit, and Beatrice came to imagine a kind of demon, an ominous force.

  Then came the word that Paris had fallen. The French government had surrendered. Beatrice would overhear the word evacuation more and more often.

  “What’s evacuation?” She asked her mother.

  “It means that we get taken away from here,” Deborah explained. “We get taken to England, where we’ll be safe. When the Germans come, we won’t be here any longer.”

  “What will happen to Dad’s roses?”

  Deborah shrugged her shoulders. “We’ll have to leave them behind.”

  “But … our house! Our furniture! Our dishes! My toys!”

  “We can only take a few things with us. But it might be that nothing will happen to our things while we’re gone.”

  Softly, Beatrice had asked, “Will we come back?”

  Her mother had had tears in her eyes. “Of course we’ll come back. The English soldiers will chase the Germans away, and then we’ll go back to our house and we’ll live just like we did before. Think of it like a vacation, okay? A nice, long vacation.”

  “Where are we going to live?”

  “With Aunt Natalie in London. You’ll like it there.”

  Aunt Natalie was Deborah’s sister. Beatrice did not like her. But no one seemed interested in what she thought of the plans to evacuate. Suitcases were packed in a hurry and panic spread over the islands like a virus. Beatrice had to choose which toy she wanted to bring with her. She picked the clown that hung over her bed and was missing a leg and an eye. Andrew fertilized and watered the roses. He looked as if at any moment his heart would break. Deborah carefully locked up the house and fastened all the window shutters; her face was frozen, and her eyes were bloodshot and red.

  “Mae and her parents are coming too, right?” Beatrice wanted to be certain once more.

  “Yes, yes,” said Deborah, but Beatrice wasn’t entirely sure it was the truth. It seemed unthinkable to her to go to England if her best friend would be staying on Guernsey. Only with Mae would this forced stay in faraway London be bearable.

  All the inhabitants of the island were gathered in St. Peter Port, or so it seemed. Cars and busses were parked far above the harbor; the streets and alleys were thronged with people, and it was impossible to get through.

  The crowd was thickest outside the provisional office of inquiries. Everyone wanted final confirmation on whether it was really necessary to depart.

  “We cannot lose sight of one another,” Andrew admonished, once they had gotten off the bus that had taken them from Le Variouf to the capital. “You two stay right behind me. Beatrice, you hold on tight to Mommy’s hand. As tight as you can!”

  Beatrice squeezed Deborah’s hand with all strength. She was dizzy from the crush of people around her. She never would have thought that so many people lived on Guernsey. She was shoved and jostled. Elbows, suitcases, and bags poked her in the ribs. Above her head people were yelling, cursing, calling out. Deborah was much too fast. Beatrice had to struggle to keep up. She kept an eye out for Mae but couldn’t find her. It would have been an extraordinary coincidence to meet a specific person in all this turmoil. Somehow they were pushed towards the ships, which lay anchored in the harbor, watched over by the massive, dark structure of Castle Cornet. There it sat, a protective fortress for the island that offered no protection at all. Many of the ships were rather battered-looking. Some of the sails were torn and had been patched up haphazardly, and on some of them the deck railing was marked with bullet holes black with soot. Beatrice heard one man ask another about this and receive the answer that some of the ships had just been mobilized for the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, where they’d been surrounded by German forces. “They sailed through heavy German fire,” he said. To Beatrice it was all sounding more and more ominous. Not at all like a vacation. More like a very dangerous adventure.

  She never knew exactly how it had happened that she had lost hold of her mother’s hand. They were already headed up the gangway to one of the ships. The crowd was even thicker now, completely impenetrable. People were getting more reckless; it was important to get a good spot, and above all not to be left behind. A tall, fat man pushed Beatrice aside. She stumbled and her hand was torn from Deborah’s. She began screaming at once, “Mommy! Mommy!”

  She heard Deborah scream as well, as shrill and full of despair as a mother cat keening for her young. A hand grabbed hers and a man called out, “I’ve got her! It’s alright! I’ve got her!”

  It was a stranger. Later Beatrice would come to the conclusion that Deborah, whom she’d immediately lost sight of, might possibly have believed it had been Andrew who had grabbed Beatrice. In the middle of all that noise and uproar it would have been easy to mistake one voice for another. In any case, she hadn’t screamed any longer, or Beatrice hadn’t heard her. It took only a few moments before she’d lost hold of the stranger’s hand as well. She started to scream, but no one answered, no one paid her any attention. She was constantly being shoved back by people pushing their way forward in the crowd, until once again she was at the beginning of the gangway. If only she had made another try to get on board the ship …

  It must have been a kind of panicked impulse, the way she reacted, fighting her way through the people in the harbor. She was driven by a single thought: Get home. Away from all the noise and the shoving. Out from the crowds of people, where she was afraid she’d suffocate or be trampled to death. At least that’s what she would remember having felt, years later. Maybe, though, she hadn’t thought or felt anything at all. She had been in shock, had moved like a wind-up toy, without sense or reason. At some point she had made it back home, near-dead with exhaustion. She had taken the spare key with trembling fingers from under a stone in the flower bed, opened the door and hidden away like a fox from a group of hunters with their dogs.

  The strange man smiled encouragingly at her. “No disaster there, little one,” he said. “You’re not alone anymore.”

  “Can you take me to my parents?” Beatrice asked.

  He shook his head. “That’s not an option. For now, no one can leave for England from here. And the other way around: no one can come back here from England.”

  “But when …”

  “Once we’ve taken over all of England,” he said, “it won’t be a problem anymore.”

  It was at this moment, in fact, that she first realized it must have been a German who was sitting across from her. That was why he spoke the English words so strangely, that was why he was wearing a uniform. He didn’t seem to be the monster she’d imagined when she’d thought of what a German might be like. He had given her water instead of immediately shooting her. It didn’t seem like he planned to do anything to her. But an unfathomable hopelessness took hold of her. Now that she was coming out of her frozen state, it began to dawn on her that Deborah and Andrew were gone, and that for a long time there would be no way to see them again.

  “Oh, what should I do?” She whispered.

  “We’re not inhuman,” the man said. �
��Nothing will happen to you.”

  “But I want to go with my Mommy!” She sounded like a little kid, she knew, and the quiver in her voice made it clear that she was about to cry.

  “You have to be a brave young lady now,” said the man, and for the first time he showed a brief flash of impatience. “It’s no use whining and crying. You’ll see your parents again someday, and until then you’ll behave in such a way that they can be proud of you.”

  She choked back her tears and nodded. He might not have known it, but he had said the very thing that would help her make it through the years that lay ahead of her.

  She would behave in such a way that Deborah and Andrew could be proud of her.

  7

  “And why is it again that you’re exchanging letters with this woman?” Kevin asked, incredulous. “You barely know her!”

  “I know,” said Beatrice. “But she asked such interesting questions. She seemed to genuinely want to know about me and Helene, about our lives. And why shouldn’t I tell her?”

  She sat at Kevin’s kitchen table and watched him as he cooked. He had invited her over for dinner, to thank her for the check she had written him, and had suggested she come a bit early, to keep him company while he got everything ready. He knew that she loved this. She was happy to sit in his small, cozy kitchen, with its whitewashed furniture; happy to drink a glass of wine, smoke a cigarette, and chat with him. She often said that there was almost nothing she found so relaxing as these get-togethers — especially when they took place without Helene.

  “So this … what’s her name again? Franca? This Franca person lives in Germany and has taken an interest in the life stories of two women, complete strangers to her, on one of the Channel Islands? I find that highly strange. Hopefully she doesn’t have some kind of dubious motive.”

  Beatrice laughed. She lit herself a cigarette and inhaled, relishing it. “What kind of dubious motive is she supposed to have?”