‘Why did you stay?’ Willi asked, his voice sounding choked.
‘I don’t know. Pride? Ashamed to admit he’d used me? Worried everyone would see me as foolish for falling for his lies, as if someone like him would look at someone like me?’
Ariella longed to comfort her, even now, after all these years.
‘So he carried on like that. Violent, abusive. He had affairs. People gossiped, so I knew. But when my father heard the rumours and confronted him, he wormed his way out of it. He said he was sorry, he just wanted a son so badly and I couldn’t give him that.’
Willi listened intently, the lines of his face hardening.
‘I thought if I could just get pregnant, have a child, then he would be happy, but… Well, he had more interest in the women he found in the bars and on the streets than in me.’
Ariella heard the pain still there.
‘Then he moved one of them into our house. A housekeeper, he said. He was obsessed with her and wanted to rub my nose in it, I suppose. I’d threatened to leave him just before she arrived, told him he would lose everything, but he just laughed at me. Told me I’d never have the guts to go back, to face my father and mother with my tail between my legs, have everyone pity me to my face and laugh at me behind my back. And he was right. As if to prove the point, he moved this woman in – she was a girl, really, not a woman – and he put her in the room downstairs.’
‘That is horrific. Did you not, even then, want to go?’ Ariella was appalled.
‘I was going to. I was going to tell my father what was going on and ask him for the money to leave, to go to another city, start fresh. But then I heard her, the girl, throwing up every morning and knew she was pregnant.’
‘So what did you do?’ Ariella asked, too involved now in the story to worry if she was overstepping any boundaries. Willi was silent.
Frau Braun laughed, a strange hissing sound. ‘I did what I should have done from the start but for my stupid pride. I went to my father at the mill and went into the office. I told him everything, how Hubert beat me, how he and I could never have a child because we were never together in that way and how now this woman, Rachel, was pregnant.’
‘And what did he say?’ Ariella was intrigued.
‘He offered to fire him, take everything back – the house, the job, all of it – but I told my papa that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted him to love me. It was stupid, I know, I can see that now. But I was young then and naïve, so I thought if we had a child, things would be different. My father felt so bad that he’d allowed such a man into our family, he was willing to do what I wanted, so he paid Rachel off, sent her to a nice Jewish nursing home – there was one near Freiburg – and when the baby was born, he was circumcised. A few days later, Hubert and I collected him and we moved to Berlin.’
‘And that baby was me,’ Willi said.
‘Yes, my darling boy.’
‘And my mother? What happened to her?’ His voice was a dull monotone.
‘She moved away, I’m not sure where. I should have asked, but I didn’t want to know, and that’s the truth. I had a baby, and I loved you so much. I didn’t want any contact with her. I’m sorry, Willi. She was just a girl.’ Her voice was pleading now, begging him not to hate her.
‘Go on,’ Willi said.
Frau Braun swallowed nervously. ‘Having you made me braver. Hubert knew he was only enjoying the life he had because of me. My father had a stern word with him before we left, putting him on notice that if he ever touched a hair on my head again, he would use his influence to make sure Hubert Braun would suffer. My father had connections even in Berlin, you see. It worked, and when we arrived here, everyone assumed you were ours of course. My father sent us money, but only in drops, no big sums any more. He didn’t trust Hubert. He got him a job with a friend of our family and warned the owner to keep a close eye on him. Hubert hated it and felt trapped. But in a way, so was I. He knew that Willi wasn’t mine, so he would hold that over me, threatening to tell my son the truth, tell everyone that I’d stolen another woman’s child. Of course it would have been the end for him too if he’d done it, but nonetheless, he and I were stuck together in a marriage of hatred, both afraid of how the other could destroy us.
‘He knew he couldn’t beat me any more. He tried, of course, but when he gave me a black eye, I called the police. As a result, Hubert was demoted at work to an even more menial job, just as my father promised. He was furious but could do nothing. We were living on money from my family. My father bought the house but kept it in his name. My husband only became a man in his own right when he joined the Party.’
‘So nobody ever knew?’ Willi asked.
‘No. Nobody. When my father died, he took the secret with him. Even my mother and sisters didn’t know – I’d begged my father not to tell anyone. I just wrote to say I’d had a baby, and they were happy. It was all fine.’
‘And your husband was happy to accept this as well?’ Ariella asked.
‘By then he had no choice.’
‘So I am a Jew,’ Willi said.
Frau Braun nodded. ‘Yes, you are. So let Ariella teach you her prayers because it might just be the thing that saves you.’
Willi turned to his mother, released Ariella’s hand and stood painfully. He hobbled on his crutches to where she sat, dry-eyed but heartbroken.
She stood, and he towered over her. Awkwardly, still leaning on a crutch, he extended his arm, and she took a step forward and rested her head on his chest. He kissed the top of her head. ‘You’re my mutti, you always have been and you always will be. I don’t know how I feel. I had no idea, but now that I know, at least I did a little bit to help. Ariella will teach us both. I’ll learn it only if you will too, because whatever we do, us three will stick together, all right?’
‘All right,’ she muttered. ‘All right, Willi. If that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.’
Shortly after that, Frau Braun got into bed, exhausted by the events of the day. Willi and Ariella sat side by side on the sofa, discussing it all. She let him talk, quietly so as not to wake his mother, as he made sense of it all in his head. Eventually, bone-tired and in pain, he lay back, staring at the ceiling. ‘So we are both Jews, you and I?’
‘It seems so.’ She smiled, and he returned the grin.
He said nothing, but his eyes searched her face. Eventually, he put his arm around her, drawing her head onto his shoulder. He’d never done that before, but she didn’t mind.
‘Thank you, Ariella.’ He held her close to him.
‘It’s I who should be thanking you and your mother. Without you –’
‘Will you take care of her if anything happens?’ he asked, interrupting her.
‘Of course. We are bonded now, and wherever one goes, we all go, at least until we are living in some kind of normality again.’
‘Thank you. She deserves some happiness, a bit of peace. She’s had a hard time for so long, and I just want her to have a nice life at the end, you know?’
‘I do. And I know it won’t, but if anything does happen to you, I give you my word that I’ll take care of her.’
He exhaled and reached over to the side table where he kept his cigarettes. Each one was precious, but he lit one now, the match illuminating his boyish face in the pitch-darkness. He inhaled and then blew out a long plume of smoke.
‘And how do you feel about it, now that you know?’ Ariella asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m all right.’
‘Would you like to know more about your birth mother?’ She had grown so close to him in recent months, she didn’t feel like she was prying.
He sighed. ‘No. I don’t think I do. Mutti is my mother. She cared for me with all of her heart, and she even stayed with that monster because she was afraid that he would take me from her, knowing how much she loved me.’
He smoked silently for a few minutes, and a companionable silence settled over them.
‘Will you stay in G
ermany after the war?’ she asked.
‘Mutti is too old to go anywhere now, so I’ll stay with her. But after that, I don’t know, America maybe?’ He finished his cigarette and crushed it out on a saucer. ‘How about you? I know you want to go to Ireland, get your children back, but then?’
‘I’ve not thought that far ahead, to be honest. I just want to see them, to hug them. They are being cared for. They’re happy. Maybe they’ll want to stay in Ireland. I don’t know.’
‘They’ll want to be with you,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re their mother.’
‘Maybe, but as you know, the person who raises you is your mother, not the person who gave birth to you. Maybe they’ll see Elizabeth as their mother now, and who could blame them? She has been.’
‘They’ll want to be with you,’ he repeated with such certainty that she longed for him to be right.
Chapter 19
Ariella took her task seriously, drilling both Willi and his mother on aspects of Judaism each day until they could pass as reasonably devout Jews.
Willi continued to see people from the White Star and foraged around the city for food, but he insisted Ariella and his mother stay indoors. It was warming up a little and spring had sprung, but the city was entirely lawless now. It was safer if they stayed inside.
The reality of most people’s existence meant they only had concern for their own problems – getting food, not getting blown to bits. The uniformity, the regimented control of society of just a few short years earlier was gone completely.
Willi said all anyone could talk about was how near the Russians were. What would they do when they got there? How would life be? People were terrified of them. News from the areas already in their control was chilling. The roads out of the city were clogged with people trying to escape the Red Army.
Ariella spoke English, so they were able to listen to the BBC on a DKE 38 radio, called a Goebbels-Schnauze by everyone. It had taken some tinkering with the frequencies, as it was only supposed to be tuned to the Nazi stations, but Willi managed to pick up the BBC faintly on it. The progress was heartening, and she was glad to hear good news about Allied advances.
They watched the evenings lengthen, and they moved the beds back into the bedrooms, so she and Willi were alone once more at night. She found herself looking forward to the evenings, when they would talk quietly in the dark. Food, while still in pitifully short supply, at least was growing again now, so what remained of the market gardens would surely produce some food soon. Someone in the resistance had given Willi a bag of oats, so they were making porridge with water. It bore no resemblance to the creamy morning bowl of goodness she used to make for the children, with cream and cinnamon and brown sugar, but at least the thin gruel filled their empty stomachs.
Willi kept them abreast of developments: the Allies were ever advancing, the Germans were decimated, the top brass were trying to broker a deal but Hitler wasn’t having it. He was still in the city, a fact Ariella found incredible, and was apparently still convinced the war was winnable.
The only time a shadow crossed Willi’s face was on the subject of the Russians. He didn’t go into details, but he warned them time and again not to leave the apartment. They could come any day.
When his mother slept, he told Ariella of the rumours coming from the east. The stories of the tortures the Red Army were exacting on the civilian population chilled her blood.
When she wasn’t drilling the Brauns on their prayers or aspects of the Jewish faith, Ariella went back to her old habits of spending the hours when she couldn’t sleep quietly reciting poems in German, translating them to English, then to French, Italian and Spanish.
‘What are you saying?’ Willi asked one night.
‘Nothing, just a poem. When I can’t sleep, I translate poems from different languages in my head,’ Ariella answered.
‘How did you learn all those languages?’ He sat up; he couldn’t sleep either.
‘My parents hired a governess to teach me – I didn’t go to regular school – and she was fluent in many languages. My parents thought that a useful skill, so she taught me multilingually.’
‘You came from money then?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Well, not really, but I suppose my parents were reasonably well off. My father was an academic, and my mother was an artist who didn’t have much interest in children to be honest, so it was a lonely childhood. I tried to be different with my own children.’
‘I think you were. I remember them, sweet little kids. I used to see you all having picnics at the park. I remember your husband too – he and I used to talk about football when I delivered your paper. I supported Hertha and he was a Union fan.’
‘That’s right, I remember.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘It’s hard to imagine that life was ever normal, isn’t it? That we cared about such things as football or picnics?’
‘I know. It does.’ He sighed.
‘I wish it was over. Whatever is to come, let it come. Let’s just get on with it, you know? This waiting, it feels so long.’
‘Yes…’ He paused. ‘And no.’ The words hung between them in the night air.
‘Why no?’ she asked.
‘Because when it’s over, you’ll go to Ireland and we’ll stay here, and this life we have made together will be over.’
‘You’ll miss the watery porridge and the cold?’ She chuckled.
There was a long silence and then he said, ‘No, but I’ll miss you.’
Chapter 20
Ballycreggan, 2 May 1945
Elizabeth was midway through explaining how to make a fraction into a percentage to her class, who were all looking longingly at the school football pitch as the emerald grass was buffed gently by the warm spring breeze. Their minds were on freedom, ice cream and trips to the beach. Daniel and the rabbi appeared at the door of her classroom. She threw Daniel a questioning look. School had just begun for the day, and she’d seen him at breakfast.
Her husband tapped on the glass and entered the room, beaming. The rabbi wore not his usual working clothes of black trousers and white shirt but his black jacket and overcoat as well as his hat; the warm weather was irrelevant to him today it would seem. The children knew when he dressed like that that something important was happening. His long beard had been salt-and-pepper-coloured when he arrived in 1939 but now was totally white, matching his hair. He looked every inch a Chassidic rabbi.
‘Mrs Lieber, please forgive the intrusion, but I felt it was warranted today,’ he said, and she suppressed a smile. She and Daniel joked about how he had learned to speak English in precisely the same archaic way he spoke German. His accent was as strong as ever, but some words had a definite Ballycreggan lilt, no doubt picked up from his two friends, Father O’Toole and Reverend Parkes.
The news about what Hitler was doing to the Jews had special resonance in Ballycreggan, the community at the farm putting a human face on the atrocities, and the locals had become increasingly protective of the group they now saw as ‘their refugees’. The work on the farm was almost complete, and the entire place was practically unrecognisable. The hard functional rooms had been transformed into cosy, warm, colourful places. So many pieces of furniture were found, and quilts and cushions appeared from all quarters. Each of the twenty-five children now had their own little room, with a bed and a quilt, each child’s name done in embroidery by the Women’s Institute. They each had a wardrobe and a locker where their things could be kept private, and each child got to pick the colour of the paint for his or her room. The garden too had undergone a makeover. There were swings and a slide and a seesaw, and farmer Jeremy O’Rourke had donated his goats to graze an empty, fairly flat meadow. When the goats had the grass down, the boys rolled it with the heavy roller, and Daniel oversaw the manufacture of a set of goalposts. The children had helped enthusiastically after school every day, and the locals pitched in whenever they could, so the transformation was much quicker than anyone had anticipated. Even the little
ones were allowed to paint the walls of the common room, so while the images were a little abstract, they added great colour. All of the children were as proud as punch.
Father O’Toole donated the parish gramophone, and some records were found in Dublin. Mrs Thomas, the village librarian, donated two boxes of books from the children’s section. The project was such a success, nobody knew why it hadn’t been done earlier. It had also strengthened the ties between the village and the farm.
It was quite common now to see the priest’s housekeeper, Mrs Forde, giving Daniel a pot of her special marmalade to be delivered to the farm because ‘the rabbi loves a bit on his soda bread’ (it was special because everyone knew it contained a generous glug of poitín, the illegal spirit made with potatoes), or to see Levi delivering extra vegetables grown on the farm to the church to be distributed among the village’s most needy families.
All of the children played together, and birthday celebrations were grouped in these straitened times – Elizabeth’s idea – so there were four birthday parties a year held in the village hall. The year was divided into three-month sections, so if a birthday fell in the first three months, that child shared a party with all others in that timeframe. Bridie in the sweetshop did her best to provide some treats, and it was common to hear ‘Happy Birthday’ being sung to ‘Katie and Haim and Seamus and Abraham’. Everyone pitched in what they could spare for the occasion, knowing their child would benefit when his or her time came. It was always a really jolly affair despite the deprivations of the seemingly endless war.
‘Of course, Rabbi. Close your maths copies, children, please.’
The Emerald Horizon (The Star and the Shamrock Book 2) Page 14