My pulse is skittering off. I put my hand on Marthe’s arm.
‘Marthe. We shouldn’t stay out here. We ought to go back inside.’
She stands there, transfixed; above us, the blue bright sky and the warplanes. I can feel a slight trembling in her, where my hand is holding her arm.
The men pay us no attention. They stop outside the opposite building, and beat and bang on the door. The caretaker opens to them at once. We hear the tramp of their footsteps up the stair, then shouts and screams from inside. After a few moments, the men come out with the people from the apartment – the frail old woman, the young, dark-haired woman, the child – the people who I’ve sometimes seen from my window.
The women look terrified. They’re carrying buckets of water and scrubbing brushes and rags, and the little girl is crying. One of the men is jostling the younger woman, so her bucket spills on the pavement, and seeing this, he hits her. The little girl wails; another man punches her viciously hard on the head. The woman puts out her hand to defend her child: her arm is knocked away. The men shout abuse at the women, hit them, push them over. If the women try to get up, they kick them again and again, screaming insults at them. The little girl crouches beside her mother, pressing her hand to her head. She’s crying silently now. Bright blood wells between her fingers.
Then I understand what the men are doing. They’re making the women scrub the paving stones, to try to erase the Schuschnigg slogans.
I clutch at Marthe’s arm.
‘Marthe. We have to do something. We have to get the police…’
She doesn’t say anything.
‘You go inside and I’ll try to find someone,’ I tell her.
It’s as though she’s spellbound, mute. Just staring.
More people gather, drawn by the shouting. They stand in a semi-circle, laughing, shouting abuse; some of them spit. Some are rough-looking, like the thugs who attacked Harri. But there are others, too. Respectable-looking people. There’s a man in a smart business suit, who fastidiously rolls up the legs of his trousers, to stop them getting wet in the water that’s spilt on the street. There’s a woman in a luxurious astrakhan coat. She has a small dog on a lead, and on her lapel she’s wearing a shiny new swastika badge. She joins in with the jeering. Above us, more squadrons of planes.
And then, at last, a policeman comes round the corner from Lange Gasse.
‘Thank God,’ I say under my breath.
He walks briskly up the street towards the crowd of people. He will intervene, stop this cruelty, assert the rule of law. I think how brave he’s being, as now it’s quite a large crowd – twenty or thirty people, pointing, spitting, shouting abuse.
One of the men in the gang turns towards the policeman, says something I can’t hear. The policeman throws back his head, laughs loudly. Cold runs through me.
Then I see that the policeman has a swastika armband. He aims a casual kick at the younger woman, as she scrubs the pavement. She falls sideways, clutching her stomach. There’s laughter. He spits in her face.
‘Marthe – we have to go in. We can’t do anything. Come on.’
I pull at her. She’s passive, weak as cotton; she doesn’t resist. I take her back into the building, and up the stairs to the flat.
She shuts the door behind her, leans against it. She’s trembling violently.
‘You should go and rest,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll ask Janika to bring you a coffee.’
But she doesn’t move, just stands there. As though she has no will; as though her body won’t obey her.
‘Come on, Marthe. I’ll take you through to the drawing room, you can take the weight off your legs.’
I take her arm and steer her.
‘No, Stella. Not the drawing room. I’d like to sit in the sun room,’ she says.
This surprises me – she usually has her coffee in the drawing room. But the sun room is secluded: it doesn’t look out on the street.
I settle her in an armchair. I bring her the footstool, so she can put up her legs and ease her varicose veins. I bring her embroidery basket to her.
‘I’ll fetch you some coffee,’ I tell her.
‘No. No coffee, thank you, Stella. I don’t quite fancy it,’ she says.
I stand there for a moment. She takes out her tapestry – the fairytale cottage with roses rambling over the door.
In the seclusion of the sun room, you can still hear the planes overhead, but their roar is muffled and dulled by the building.
‘The thing is, Stella…’ It’s almost as though she’s continuing a conversation we’ve had. ‘The thing is, this isn’t how I thought it would be—’ Her voice cracks like frost-bitten glass. She tries again. ‘This isn’t how I imagined it happening. Not like this,’ she tells me.
I wait a moment longer, but she doesn’t say anything more. She threads her needle, starts her stitching.
I try to practise, but it’s impossible. I’m so worried about Harri and his family. But at least Harri is at the hospital for the day. He should be safe there.
After a while, I look out into the street. The shouting is more distant now, the gang of men have moved on. There’s no sign of the people from the opposite flat. When I glance across at their windows, I can’t see anyone moving there, in those other rooms.
I think of the dark-haired woman, what I know about her. How she will brush the tangles out of her little girl’s hair. How she will care for the older woman – her mother, or mother-in-law. How the little girl makes her feel happy, and the old woman makes her feel sad. How she will put flowers into a vase, and hold one close to her face, lost in some subtle labyrinth of her mind, remembering. Living an ordinary life, a life of small things: small nurturing actions, dreams and memories, everyday decisions. Believing herself to be a citizen of Vienna – with all the rights and protections that ought to come from being a citizen. Believing herself to belong here.
I wish I’d done more to try to protect her. I could at least have protested, but I was too afraid.
At last, I pull on my coat and go to the building over the road. I scan the names outside the building. On the first floor: Herr and Frau Edelstein.
The caretaker comes to the door. He has eyes grey as flint, and a hard, closed face.
‘I want to see the woman in the first floor flat – Frau Edelstein,’ I tell him.
He looks me up and down.
‘You’re the English girl, aren’t you? From over the road. The girl who lives with the Krauses.’
‘Yes … I just wondered how Frau Edelstein was…’
He fixes me with his flinty eyes.
‘There’s a lot to be said for minding your own business,’ he tells me.
‘But was she badly hurt? Has she seen a doctor?’ I ask.
‘Best to stay out of it, fräulein. It’s no concern of yours, what’s happening in this city. So you say you come from Britain?’
I nod.
He shrugs slightly.
‘Perhaps you should go back where you came from,’ he says.
He shuts the door on me.
Rainer is out all day. In the evening, Marthe and I have dinner without him.
Marthe has put on more make-up than usual – powder and lipstick and rouge. She must have wanted to give herself a healthy colour, but the rouge looks garish against the white of her skin. Her hands look raw, where she’s been washing them.
For a while, we eat in silence.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Marthe starts talking.
‘What you have to remember, Stella, is the bigger picture…’ Her voice is even and measured, as though she’s explaining all this to a child. ‘Herr Hitler has achieved so much in Germany. They say he’s taken two million unemployed off the streets. Well, that’s an achievement, surely? Think what that must mean to people, when they couldn’t feed their families. And he’s wiped away all the shame of the German peoples after Versailles. That treaty was so terrible – the way the German nations got all the blame for the war. H
e’s made Germany strong and respected again.’ Putting down her cutlery, then taking it up again. ‘There’s a lot of unemployment here in Austria. Well, you’ve seen that. People are struggling. Many Austrians have watched the Third Reich rather enviously. Many Austrians have wanted to be a part of all that.’
I feel a spurt of anger. I’m not going to placate her.
‘What we saw on the street was terrible,’ I say.
‘Yes, of course, Stella, of course it was. Very ugly.’ Cutting her meat in neat slices, and leaving it there on her plate; not eating it. ‘These things are unfortunate, of course. It’s not very pretty – all the rabble-rousing. Perhaps he goes a bit too far, to appease the rowdier elements. But against all that, you have to weigh all the good he has done.’
I open my mouth to speak, but she talks over me.
‘The thing is, my dear, when you’re young, like you, you want things to be perfectly clear. But we live in a fallen world, Stella. There’s always going to be a balance – things to be weighed in the scales.’
She’s been thinking this through all day. She’s managed to persuade herself – stitching her fairytale cottage, in the cloistered sun room that has no view of the street.
‘You have to take the long view,’ she says.
I don’t say anything. I don’t know where to begin.
Janika is sitting at the kitchen table. The sink is piled with the dirty dishes from dinner; she hasn’t begun to wash them. She’s listening to the wireless. She looks up as I go in.
‘Is there any news?’ I ask her.
‘They’re saying that Herr Hitler has entered Linz,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
Linz is the capital of Upper Austria. I remember how Frank said that this was where Hitler had lived as a child.
‘He had a triumphant reception, they’re saying. He was welcomed with flowers,’ she tells me.
I sit down beside her, don’t say anything.
Her face is clouded with thought.
‘I saw the things that happened in the street, Fräulein Stella,’ she says. ‘What they did to the Edelsteins.’ Her voice is hollow.
‘Yes.’
‘Those poor poor women, so cruelly treated. And it’s been happening all over our city. Dietrich told me.’ She clasps her hands tight together, so the bones are white through her skin. ‘They aren’t all like that, the Viennese. They aren’t all cruel. You have to believe me, Fräulein Stella. There are good people in this city,’ she says.
‘Then they shouldn’t have let it happen.’
‘Today the good people were frightened,’ she says. ‘They stayed in their houses; they shut their doors and stayed there. Today the good people did nothing. Today they didn’t come out.’
‘Someone could have tried to stop it…’
Janika shakes her head slowly.
‘It isn’t always so easy, Fräulein Stella,’ she says. ‘Like when poor Fräulein Verity left. What can you do? You may hate yourself for it, but sometimes you can’t do anything.’
‘Fräulein Verity?’ At last, I understand the thing that has puzzled me all these months. ‘She was Jewish? That was why the Krauses sacked her?’
Janika nods.
‘It wasn’t Frau Krause’s doing. Frau Krause was keen she should stay. She said she was such a nice girl, and she loved little Lukas to bits. But Herr Krause said in the present climate they couldn’t keep her,’ she says. ‘And of course Frau Krause did as he wanted.’
‘But how did it happen, Janika? When Verity had been looking after Lukas all that time?’
The frown lines knot between Janika’s brows.
‘They didn’t know she was Jewish, when Frau Krause first employed her. But then her father came to visit her, here in Vienna,’ she says. ‘He’d come to Austria on business, and he came round here to the flat. He was taking her out to dinner, at the Sacher Hotel. Fräulein Verity was excited – she was wearing her very best frock. It’s sad to think back on, Fräulein Stella … And Herr Krause met the man in the hallway, and suspected the man was a Jew.’
‘Oh.’
‘I heard Herr and Frau Krause talking, that night. Herr Krause was very emphatic. The next day, he questioned Fräulein Verity, and he said she had to go. Fräulein Verity was so upset.’
I think of Lukas. How he watched her tears fall onto her quilt; how he wondered who had hurt her.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She must have been.’
There’s something dark in Janika’s face, a kind of shame, as though she feels complicit in what happened.
‘It seemed so wrong. But how can you stand against it, Fräulein Stella? How can you stop it? Sometimes it isn’t possible, to make a stand,’ she says.
She sits slumped at the table, her head bowed.
I can’t sleep.
The streets are entirely quiet now. The gangs who were roaming the city must have joined the torchlight procession that Rainer was helping to plan, to celebrate Hitler’s coming.
At last I hear the front door closing. Rainer must have come home.
I hear him go to the bathroom, and then along to his study – perhaps to smoke a cigar and sip a brandy, and stretch out his legs in the comforting warmth of the stove. As any man might do, after a busy time out in the world. I think of the story Janika once told me, about the supernatural evil in her village.
What did he look like? What kind of man was he? Was there anything different about him?
She said there was nothing you’d notice. He was just an ordinary man.
I get up, go to the window. Maria-Treu-Gasse is utterly still. There’s no wind, the flags hang limply, all their colour taken away, so they look black and grey in the chilly moonlight. A little snow is falling, the snowflakes briefly illumined as they fall through the light of the lamps, then settling on the pavement, covering over the slogans that were painted there just a few days ago, in that brief eruption of patriotic fervour. Apart from the flags, the street looks normal. As though none of this had happened; as though the world hadn’t changed.
66
Sunday morning.
I decide to walk to Dr Zaslavsky’s – I don’t know if the trams will be running. I’ve looked at the map, and Türkenstrasse should only take half an hour. I put my music in my music case, and wrap up warmly. I wear my new coat and my foxfur hat, I tuck my mother’s scarf into the neck of my coat, and I wear two pairs of gloves, to be sure my hands won’t be too chilled to play when I get there.
I set off through the quiet Sunday suburbs. It’s cold, and my breath is like smoke. The pavement looks clean as a fresh linen sheet, from the snow that fell overnight. There are no footprints; no one is up. There’s no sign of the gangs of yesterday, who are probably all still asleep, in a drunken stupor. The streets are empty, too empty, even for a Viennese Sunday.
I head towards the city centre. The air begins to throb with sound.
I don’t know where the noise is coming from. I look upwards, but there are no Luftwaffe planes overhead. The sky is grey and empty and has a pewter shine. The noise makes me think of heavy traffic on a distant road. You never hear such traffic in Vienna, early on Sunday morning.
I draw near to Währingerstrasse, one of Vienna’s main highways. I turn the corner, walk into a great wall of sound, a roar of vehicle engines. I come out onto the street. I gasp. Währingerstrasse is full of German army lorries, a vast slow-moving convoy, stretching in either direction as far as you can see. The Wehrmacht, the great German war-machine, has come to Vienna.
I stand for a moment and stare, at all this massive, awe-inspiring apparatus of war. The German soldiers, steel-helmeted, sit motionless in their vehicles, their hands on the barrels of their rifles. The air is blue and thick with exhaust fumes that snag in my throat.
A soldier on a motorcycle rides down the inside of the convoy, near the pavement where I’m walking. He slows, raises his hand in greeting.
‘Good morning, fräulein,’ he says.
My voice replying
is washed away in the great tsunami of sound.
I have to cross Währingerstrasse to reach Dr Zaslavsky’s apartment; I have to find my way through this solid line of vehicles. I don’t know how to do this; for a moment, I think I will have to give up and go home. But I stand on the kerb and wave and catch the eye of one of the drivers, and to my relief he nods and beckons me over in front of his truck.
At Dr Zaslavsky’s building on Türkenstrasse, the tall street doors are open. I go in under the arch. His apartment is at street level. I ring the bell by his door. The door opens.
‘Ah, Fräulein Whittaker. Excellent. Thank you for coming,’ he says.
He is immaculate, as always, his shirt and wing-collar crisply starched. He ushers me inside. I take off my hat and coat and scarf and he hangs them on the hat stand. The flat is spacious and high-ceilinged, with a long, dim, parquet-floored hall.
He takes me into his drawing room. The first thing I notice is the piano – a magnificent Bösendorfer. But there are many other beautiful things as well – a bronze of a dancer; African carvings; an abstract painting, a giddy gorgeous rush of scarlets and golds. There are shelves full of books with opulent bindings. It looks as though he lives alone, as I’d suspected. There’s no sign of a woman’s touch in the flat; there are no crochet runners or vases of flowers, none of those intricate little arrangements that women seem to favour. Just paintings, carvings, music, wonderful books.
Sometimes I’ve felt almost sorry for him, imagining him to have a rather limited life. I’m embarrassed that I ever thought that. His apartment speaks so eloquently of the rich, full life he has lived.
I sit at the keyboard.
‘So, to work, Fräulein Whittaker. Chopin is your composer, as we know. Today you will play only Chopin for me,’ he says.
This makes me happy.
First, he wants the E flat Nocturne. I play, and he listens in that intent way he has; as though listening is an active thing, engaging the heart and the soul.
Afterwards, I glance at him, trying to guess what he thought, to prepare myself. He frowns a little. Today, his face looks more seamed than ever. In the lemon light of the lamp that stands by the piano, you can see how the years have marked him and worn him away.
The English Girl Page 30