by Anika Scott
“Where are you going, dear?” Frau Hermann asked.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’ll be going away for a few days.”
“Where to?”
“I’ll be back Sunday.” She was turning away, and Frau Hermann caught her elbow and led her back to the table.
“Wait a moment, dear, no need to run away from us. I have something special for the new bride.”
“That’s so kind, but I really have to pack for the train—”
But her landlady pressed her firmly into her seat, then hurried into the kitchen, where she murmured something to her granddaughter, a stocky girl who tossed a worried glance into the dining room and then vanished. That look. What errand could Frau Hermann be sending the girl on with such urgency? The kitchen door slammed, and then Frau Hermann swept back into the dining room. With great satisfaction, she was brandishing a packet of Player’s, offering each lodger one cigarette. “To smoke,” she said, “not to hoard. We’re celebrating Fräulein Müller’s good fortune.”
Clara didn’t smoke. Frau Hermann knew this, yet she lit Clara’s cigarette first, an odd look—of cunning? triumph?—in her eyes.
Uneasy, Clara puffed at the cigarette until it was low enough to set aside without offense. British cigarettes were selling for about four marks a stick, making Frau Hermann’s gift a generous one. Too generous—as if she had plenty more. Where in the world had she gotten them from? And the bottle of schnapps? The black market? Allied soldiers? The boardinghouse had nothing those soldiers would want to buy, and Frau Hermann was too prim to sell her body. She wondered what else Frau Hermann could have sold for British favors.
Clara made her excuses and pounded up the stairs. In her room, she washed quickly in the basin and then dressed in as many layers of clothing as possible. The more she wore, the less she would have to carry. She pulled her bed away from the wall and peeled back the loose wallpaper, exposing the hole she had discovered soon after she moved in. Stacked inside were the tins of food she’d been saving for the trip to Essen. After packing these away in her backpack, she reached deeper into the hole, pawing the cold, loose mortar and cringing at the possibility of spiders. Finally, her fingers closed around the envelope. She opened it and took out the ring first. Far grander than Blum’s, it was a one-carat diamond in a gold band, which she polished now and then when she was feeling homesick. Clara’s grandfather had bought it for her grandmother on the occasion of an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin. Clara had never cared about kaisers, but had loved Grandmother Sophia, who took up tennis at age sixty and once tried to break the racket over her knee when she lost. Sophia had given her everything her mother hadn’t provided: the warm body to lean against, the protective arm when there was strife with her brothers, an honest word of advice when she was anxious about her feet growing so fast or the hair sprouting under her arms. Clara slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly.
The only other thing in the envelope was a photograph. Her family in the winter garden at Falkenhorst, her childhood home. Seeing it sparked a rush of love and sorrow. It had been taken late in 1940, the last time they were photographed all together, her parents, her brothers, and her. Grandmother Sophia formed the center, upright in her wheelchair, immaculate and frail. Papa stood behind her, his beloved mother, his hands on the back of her chair. The war hadn’t aged him yet. His face was slim and sharp and he had a full head of pale gleaming hair. Yet even now, years later, Clara saw the hint of anxiety in his face. He had news for the family, but kept it quiet until after the photographer left.
Anne, Clara’s mother, already knew. In the photograph, she stood to Papa’s right, her lovely face pinched and anxious. This was so unusual for her, especially when cameras were around, that Clara had kept turning to look at her, and then at Papa, which had driven the photographer mad. In the final shot, her face was half turned to Papa, her hand nervously clutching the arm of Grandmother’s wheelchair. Clara was twenty-four years old, hair tousled, wearing a harlequin-printed skirt Elisa had sewn for her because the colors cheered them both.
After the photographer left, dear Friedrich, dashing in his Luftwaffe uniform, had poured drinks for everyone. Grandmother Sophia first, of course, then Papa, Mother, the older sons Heinrich, in a suit, and Otto, in uniform. Next, himself, the youngest son. Only then did he carry a cognac over to Clara, the baby of the family. He raised an eyebrow at her. What’s going on? She shrugged and was glad when he sat beside her on the divan.
Papa called the nurse to wheel Grandmother out, and Sophia said, “Just because I’m dying doesn’t mean I’m blind, Theo. What’s bothering you?”
He nursed his glass, his other hand balled in his pocket. His face was unusually pale, a trick of the daylight, Clara hoped, the cold, white sky penetrating the glass walls. “You’re all aware I’ve been maintaining a line of communication with Fritz Thyssen in France,” he said.
Thyssen was a fellow Catholic industrialist Papa had known all his life. After years of supporting Hitler, Thyssen had begun openly protesting the war. Hitler, he said, was driving Germany to ruin. As far as Clara was concerned, this was true, and though she’d never liked Thyssen’s previous political views, she had been shocked when his industrial holdings were confiscated and his family driven into exile in Vichy France by the very party he’d once endorsed. Most recently, Germany had been demanding his extradition.
“I’ve just had word,” Papa said, “that Fritz and his wife have been turned over to the Gestapo and brought back to Germany.”
The heavy silence in the room made Clara lean against Friedrich, who put his arm around her. He could usually see the good side of any situation, but even he looked grim.
Grandmother asked, “Where are they now?”
“Apparently they’ve been committed to some kind of a . . .” As Papa took another drink, he mumbled into his glass, “. . . sanatorium.”
All around them, a draft rustled the palm trees her mother loved, the broad-leafed bushes, and the vines that would flower in summer.
“We’ll do what we can for them,” Papa said.
Anne put her hand on his arm, a warning look, but he ignored her. “The war is going well. It shouldn’t last much longer. Until it’s over, we will continue to serve our country and that is all.”
He was looking at Clara, and she held his gaze as long as she could, but then she lowered her eyes, always the first to give in, and angry at herself for it. In the past, she had told him how much she disliked Thyssen, who had supported the Nazis when they were following his political agenda. But he had turned against the war, and now it wasn’t so easy to paint him as blackly as she once did. As long as he was one of “them,” she had been able to draw a clear line separating people like him from her father, who was not a true believer. She certainly wasn’t either; she couldn’t stand how the Reich sought to control how people lived, worked, and thought, or the hatred and violence of their ideology. Papa felt the same, but he considered himself a pragmatist. “Hold your nose, open your wallet, and shake their hands.” That was his method of getting on with the regime. It galled her when he spoke at Party functions or chatted with Hitler and Mussolini when they visited Essen before the war, but she understood why he did it, from his perspective at least. In his study, he admitted to her how he despised some of the things he had to do to keep the government pacified. A little playacting on his part, he said, was necessary to protect the mines and factories, her and her brothers, her mother and grandmother too, and the reputation of the family. His primary duty was to preserve this legacy for the next generation. When he said that, he had put his hand on hers, and there was an electric shock as if he was transferring this duty to her.
His playacting was a sensible survival tactic, given the circumstances, even if the hint of cowardice left a bad taste in her mouth. But at least it was better than being a Nazi disciple, fawning over the little men in their uniforms, awed by the führer, eager to die in some twisted idea of glory. In private, she wa
s quite bold about telling her father that a strong and just society had a free press and no political prisoners. He agreed with her with a wave of his hand. “But this is the world we live in.” He tapped the arm of his chair. “This world, here and now. It’s only temporary anyway. The kaiser was still around when you were a baby. He went. Weimar came and went. Now the Nazis are here. In a few years, they’ll be gone too. Don’t put your faith in this or that society. Put it in the only thing that endures.”
The family, of course. It was a good family on the days she could avoid her mother, and she knew that it had sheltered her from the storms that had shaken Germany her whole life. But was there a point at which her father would say or do what he truly believed, despite the risk? Would she? Thyssen had spoken out and was taking the consequences, and now she knew—they all knew—no family was truly safe.
She had longed to talk more to Papa about all of this, but the topic seemed to irritate him lately. He made it clear that Thyssen’s views were not the issue at all. The consequences of dissent were. Exile, confiscations, arrest. Ruin. Papa would not let that happen to this family. Did she understand?
In her attic room, she put the family photograph inside the woodstove. Then she added the magazine’s picture of Papa in the internment camp. She lit the match and let it burn. If her brothers had lived, so much in her life would have been different. If she’d gone into exile. If there hadn’t been a war. If, if, if. Like her father, she had playacted for years to preserve the family, and they had lost everything regardless. Did he see the irony the way she did?
She touched the flame to the paper and watched it consume her family and herself.
ON THE TRAIN station platform, Clara waited with the crowd sitting on their suitcases and bags, an hour when a train was supposed to come and didn’t, another hour when she and many others got up to walk around and keep warm while maneuvering their way to the edge of the tracks. The closer she was, the better chance she had of getting a seat on the train. If it came at all.
When it finally arrived, the Reichsbahn men whistled and pushed the people on the platform back until the passengers had disembarked. Another whistle, and there was a surge forward, Clara kicking and boxing her way to a seat by the window, glassed by some miracle, but useless now because it was dark. People packed the rest of the car, pressing her to the wall, pinning her at the thigh, jamming her knees, stepping on her feet. Passengers hugged suitcases and sacks and backpacks like her own, except theirs looked empty. She guessed some of them were heading to the countryside to scrounge in the fields for a forgotten potato or an edible stalk. They had the blank stares of the hungry and smelled soiled. Out of nowhere, a bout of nausea hit her. She pressed her handkerchief to her nose and mouth and remembered the transports arriving at the family iron works from the occupied territories behind the Eastern Front. The doors of the freight cars rolling open, releasing the concentrated stench of the people inside, Russians perhaps, Ukrainians, thin, gray, frightened, peering out at her . . .
The train began to move, and she pulled her scarf in front of her face and breathed in deeply, her smell at least, no one else’s. Think of now, not then. She was on her way. That was what she should dwell on. The thrill, the power of all this steel carrying her home. She tried to imagine what it was going to be like, which streets had been cleared of rubble, which buildings had been salvaged, which knocked down. She wondered if a single chestnut had been left standing on the Huyssenallee and, if so, would it ever sprout leaves again? She wondered about her family home, if it had survived. The iron works too, though she had seen aerial photographs of it in an Allied magazine. Kilometers of destruction, the same desert she had fled at the end of the war.
Her mood darkened again, and she struggled to pull her mind back to something that would soothe her. Elisa opening her door, not angry, not accusing her of abandonment, just a scream of surprise and delight. She would drag Clara into the house, crying, “God, God in heaven,” over and over, though she didn’t believe in anything of the sort. There would be long, emotional hugs. Tears, maybe. The time apart wouldn’t matter. They had known one another for so long.
They had first met fifteen years ago at a café overlooking the Ruhr. The hills had unfolded below as Clara leaned on the terrace railing, gazing all the way down to the water. It was a warm spring day but the winds were strong, rattling the white tablecloths. People held down their hats, and some went inside. That was out of the question for her, because of the fresh air—there were so few places in the city where the air was this sweet—and because her mother had ordered her to stay with Elisa, the office girl.
Elisa, in a white hat, her curls wrestled to the back of her neck in an unfashionable bun. Her hands in her white gloves were fiddling with the porcelain. Her costume was the soft white of eggshells. She chewed her bottom lip and looked anxiously around her, reminding Clara somehow of a rabbit. It was the first time Clara had ever seen her, or, at least, had noticed her. Anne had said Elisa was seventeen and worked in the legal department at the Works. The poor thing needed a friend, and Clara did too. Anne wouldn’t say why an office girl was suddenly deemed a fitting companion for her daughter, and Clara assumed it was a slight for something she herself had done, for the trouble she’d been in at school, or the times she’d walked in the garden barefoot like a heathen, as Anne would say. “You’re becoming common, darling,” Anne had told her not so long ago. And here was Elisa, a common girl to show Clara what she was in danger of being.
The whole situation was strange, but then Clara was accustomed to her mother’s manipulative tendencies. People were indulgent with Anne because she was English and rich, and she suffered no fools. She shimmered in gray silk at a nearby table, pretending to read the newspaper, and somehow—Clara never knew how she did it—observing everything through sulkily lowered eyelids. For a moment, Anne looked directly at Clara at the railing, and ice chilled Clara’s spine. She returned to sit across from Elisa, not sure what to say to this girl all in white. She looked nice. Maybe it was her freckles.
“I think it’s awful too,” Elisa said quietly, the wind taking her words out and over the hills.
“What is?”
“Making you come here. And me. It’s humiliating.”
Fidgeting with her napkin, Clara grasped for a topic of conversation. “Well, what does your father do?” This said half of what one needed to know about a person.
“He died years ago.” Elisa said this with a relief Clara couldn’t begin to understand.
The waitress brought the coffee and cake. Elisa took a sip, drawing her lips back with a hiss. Then she tried the cake, scooping a swirl of cream onto her fork and licking it off like a cat. She held it in her mouth for a moment, and Clara saw the pallor spreading around her freckles.
“Is something wrong?”
“I just . . . have a delicate stomach.”
“You’re going to be sick.” Clara got up, searching for more napkins. What was she supposed to do with this flimsy girl who couldn’t stomach coffee and cream cake? “Are you going to faint?”
Something steely came into Elisa’s eyes. “I don’t faint.”
“Well, you look like you’re going to. Why did you come if you’re not feeling well?”
“You should sit down. Your mother’s watching.”
Clara dropped back into her chair. “I have an aspirin. Will that help?”
Elisa began to cluck in her throat, and Clara thought this girl was going to be sick after all. But then Elisa’s laughter erupted, so loudly the people at the other tables turned to stare. “No, an aspirin won’t help.”
“Is it catching?”
“No. You’ll probably get it one day, though.” The mirth drained from Elisa’s face. “Don’t tell your mother I said that. Please. We’re laughing about . . . tell her it was about a film.”
The fear in Elisa’s face intrigued Clara. She forgot the question of illness, pulled her chair closer, and asked softly, “Why did my mother tell you
to meet with me? She told me you needed a friend.”
“I suppose I do.” Elisa’s lips parted, and a tingle ran up Clara’s arms. Elisa was about to tell her something important. A secret.
But then the wind gusted over the terrace, shaking the tables and rattling the porcelain. The tablecloth whipped in Clara’s face. As she batted it away, her hat dislodged itself from her hair. With a yelp, she ran after it to the edge of the terrace and jumped up, reaching out because her mother would be furious: a perfectly good hat flying into the river. Her feet were off the ground; she was teetering on the railing. Then she felt arms around her, Elisa pulling her back, light brown curls flying around her face.
“I saved your life,” she said.
“Not my hat, though.” They smiled shyly at each other. Fear seemed to sit deep in the flecks in Elisa’s pale blue irises. When Clara saw that, she wanted to protect her, though she didn’t know why or from what.
They returned to their table. Elisa walked stiffly as if her joints hurt. She lowered herself awkwardly into her chair and, with a sigh, pressed her hand to her stomach. Clara’s stomach ached in sympathy, and she met Elisa’s gaze.
Neither of them said anything about a baby. Not until a couple of months later when Elisa couldn’t hide it anymore. By then, they were spending as much time with each other as Clara could get away with. Lounging on towels in the park, ogling boys at the cinema, or talking as they strolled under shady trees. She had never talked so much in her life. About fashion, politics, poetry, aeronautics, kittens. It was as though Elisa had uncorked her and all sorts of ideas bubbled out. Within the year, she entrusted Elisa with her deepest, darkest secrets. Like the scare she’d had with Max when Clara wept with fright in Elisa’s bathroom because her cycle was late. Elisa had gone through this already, all of the same confusion and panic, and Clara was so grateful to have a friend who knew how it felt and didn’t judge. When it turned out to be a false alarm, Elisa gave her some well-worn pamphlets that explained how to prevent such an issue in future. No one else in Clara’s life would have done such a thing for her. Elisa was the sister she had always wanted, and if her mother regretted introducing her to this so-called commoner, too bad.