The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  And now it was gone. House after house was nothing more than a mound of rubble all along the street. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  A broken piece of Elisa’s scorched front door lay in the dead grass as if the house had been nothing, not a place Clara’s grandmother had built, her family had paid for, and Elisa had made her home. Clara lifted a side of the door so that it leaned against the stump of a tree. Its bright Mediterranean blue had survived, painted by Elisa for her son, though the color violated the neighborhood ordinances. When he was five, Willy had played in the woods by himself, and then wandered Sophienhof trying to find his way home. He had ended up in a neighbor’s kitchen where the maid found him drinking milk straight out of the bottle. Elisa had painted the door, showed it to Willy, and said, “Look, this is home.” He painted a small piece of wood the same shade and carried it around for years. When Clara had reported this to her mother, Anne had sniffed and said, “What a strange little creature.”

  Clara backed away from the door, from bits of the house scattered around the yard, appalling things that didn’t belong in the open air—a cracked sink covered in mold, a stained toilet enthroned on the lawn. She circled the house to the back, and was relieved to see the orderly furrows in the vegetable garden Elisa had tended in the war. The garden was a sign that she was still here. In the cellar, maybe. It had to have survived the bombs. Clara descended a short flight of concrete steps set within the ground.

  “Elisa?” Clara banged her fist on the cellar door. “Elisa, it’s me. Open up.” She spat on the hem of her scarf and rubbed her face. She was still rubbing away the dirt when the door opened a crack and a voice rumbled from within.

  “What do you want?”

  Not Elisa’s voice. Or maybe Clara had forgotten how it sounded.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  She almost said her real name, but her heart pounded a warning. “I’m looking for Elisabeth Sieland. Do you know where she is?”

  The door opened wider. The woman looking up at her, squinting in the daylight, had the creased face of a squashed cabbage. Frizzing hair straggled out from under her head scarf. “You’re hurt, fräulein. Your face.”

  “It’s nothing. Is Elisabeth Sieland here? This is her house.”

  “Sieland? The Rabenmutter?”

  Clara bristled at the old term. Because Elisa had worked outside the home even when her son was small, she had been called a neglectful raven mother often enough, sometimes to her face. It had wounded her deeply.

  “Is she here or not?” Clara said.

  The woman mounted the steps outside, looking with suspicion at the garden and the path that led around the house to the front. “Come back down, fräulein. Watch your step there. If you don’t hold on, it’s a long way to fall.”

  As the woman led her into the cellar, she apologized for her caution. The world had gone mad. There were gangs of youths on the streets; there were thieves and murderers about. Even here. “This used to be a good neighborhood, fräulein,” she said. “Didn’t have to lock our doors. And now? Leave a bucket outside with a hole in it and somebody’ll steal it.”

  At the bottom of the steps, Clara rubbed her hip and caught her breath. Inside the cellar, miner’s lamps hung from the walls as they had in the war. Here and there, net sacks containing turnips or a loaf of bread dangled from hooks in the ceiling. The trunks of oak trees shored up the cellar like pillars. She touched the bark. This had been Willy’s idea. He’d probably been almost eleven, small for his age but looking oddly mature in his Jungvolk uniform. His oma, Elisa’s mother, had died in a bombardment, and from then on, he had pored over air-raid leaflets, his finger following the words as he read in a whisper. After the oaks were installed, he took Clara on a tour, explaining the technical advantages, forgetting his shyness. “It looks like a forest underground, growing in the dark, right, fräulein?” Now Clara circled the trees, suddenly troubled. Something was missing, something that had been here in the war.

  She could see half a dozen people, including children, in the bunks that Willy had insisted on building to army specifications. At a pinch, the children could squeeze three to one bed, one adult with one child in the lower bunk. There was one narrow bed at the back wall. Barely room for this family to sleep, and none at all for Elisa and Willy.

  The woman introduced herself as Frau Berger and pointed to an old man she said was her father-in-law. He dabbed his lip with a handkerchief and watched Clara with suspicion.

  “What are you doing here?” Clara asked. “This is Elisabeth Sieland’s house.”

  “Sit here, fräulein”—Frau Berger pulled a chair from the table—“by the fire.” She added in a whisper, “You’re the one they’re looking for, aren’t you? The British were here.”

  “When?”

  “Late last night and again this morning. Turned everything upside down, grand as you like. Had a poke about in the ruins of the house. I had to tell that officer not to collapse the roof on our heads.” She gestured at the ceiling. “They came down here searching our things. Pulled the children out of bed too, like you were hiding under the blankets with them.”

  “Did he tell you who I am?”

  “He showed us your identity card.” She paused. “Fräulein Müller.”

  Clara waited for more. She wasn’t sure of these people. They were squatters, that was clear, whether Elisa still lived here or not. She couldn’t yet tell if it was to her advantage to say who she really was, if her identity would impress them. It might come down to whether they had worked for Krupp or Falkenberg. That was the division that had mattered, the sides everyone in the city used to take one way or another.

  But now there was another side, a sense of self-preservation that trumped all the old loyalties. If she announced herself to these people like some exiled princess come home, they might turn her in for British cigarettes. Maybe Fenshaw had bribed them to work for him as he had done with her landlady in Hamelin.

  Frau Berger was staring at her, and Clara realized why the woman had seated her here, the firelight in Clara’s face, the lantern overhead. This was the brightest spot in the cellar. Well, then. Clara took off her hat. If Frau Berger wanted to see her, let her see.

  The old man came closer, examining her from this angle, from that, his left foot dragging as he limped around her. He lowered his handkerchief. The left side of his mouth sagged, and when he spoke, his words slurred as if his tongue was too thick for him. “Clärchen,” he said, and his eyes moistened. “It is you, Clärchen.”

  Her old nickname, Little Clara, echoed inside of her, filled her with a warmth she hadn’t felt in a long time. The Falkenberg workers had given her the name when she was a girl and her father paraded her around the Works like a mascot. From then on, Papa had called her Clärchen too.

  “You’re sure?” Frau Berger asked.

  The old man was dribbling again. He pressed his handkerchief to his mouth with a look of apology and embarrassment. “I worked for your grandfather. Your father too.”

  “He was an accountant,” Frau Berger said, “for forty years.”

  “Your father used to bring you to headquarters and you’d stand behind his desk during meetings. He’d do the same for his sons, but it was different with you. He was a better man when you were watching. Fairer, more patient. Do you remember that?”

  Clara was nodding, and by the time she realized, it was too late. Frau Berger gasped, her hand over her mouth. In the bunk bed, the children raised their heads, their necks thin as baby birds’.

  The mistake was made. There was nothing else to be done.

  Clara stood up, back straight—that iron rod which was supposedly in her spine—and faced Herr Berger the way her father had taught her. Direct, with a dignity that would remind this man of a time when they were family, of a kind. In her old voice, her tone of cool calm, she told the truth.

  “I need your help.”

  7

>   The Bergers didn’t hesitate. They discussed what was to be done, how they could protect Clara, starting with setting one of the boys as a guard. Frau Berger coaxed him out of bed, a scrawny thing whose clothes were too short at the legs and wrists. Clara tried to tell them he didn’t have to do this, but his mother grasped his shoulders and forced him to stand taller. “Show Fräulein Falkenberg respect.” She swatted his back, and he bowed like a puppet before scurrying up the cellar steps and out into the cold.

  Solemnly, the old man fetched a neckerchief from a cigar box, unfolding the red-orange fabric on his palm. Clara recognized the symbol on the fabric, a bird’s wing sweeping up like a stylized flame. The Falkenberg symbol, everywhere in her life since the day she was born and wrapped in swaddling clothes with that symbol stitched on the cotton. Only a hot iron could have branded her more clearly. The old man tied the kerchief around his neck, his chin up. It was done with such ceremony and Clara remembered the many acts of respect for her family over the years: the workers lining up like an honor guard, the bankers whispering on the way to the vault. None of that compared to this. None of them took the risk the Bergers were taking now, putting themselves in jeopardy to stand by her against Allied soldiers.

  The loose skin of his jaw trembled as Herr Berger tied the knot. “Fräulein, in the name of my family—”

  Embarrassed, she gestured for him to stop.

  “—I want to say how honored we are to be of service. We’ll do everything we can to help you.”

  She didn’t know what to say in the face of his decency. On her own for so long, it had been some time since she had been truly grateful to anyone and here she was, her first day home, gratitude washing over her in waves. “Thank you,” she said, shaking his hand, Frau Berger’s hand, and then the children’s, each bony hand raised out of the blankets. She wanted to do something for them—not solely to be a burden or a problem. She flourished a can of chopped pork and another of peas and carrots from her backpack, and the children chirped happily.

  As Frau Berger busied herself with the soup, the old man admitted the family had been bombed out of their own house across the street. “Still can’t believe it,” he said. “Bombing us at the last minute. A disgrace. The whole western end of Sophienhof gone in one raid.”

  “When exactly?” Clara was rolling the meat into balls that would cook in the soup, and as she listened, she concentrated on rolling a perfect edible sphere.

  “Eleventh of March forty-five. You must remember that one, fräulein. That was hell raining down from the sky.”

  She nodded, dropped the meat in the soup and then scrubbed her hands in the basin. Eleventh of March. The same day she left Essen. As soon as she had heard the sirens, she had known it might be her last chance to get away. For weeks she’d delayed the decision as the bombardments pounded them, news flooding in of lost battles, massive fatalities, and the Americans crossing the Rhine, the ultimate sign that the war would be over in days. She was too exhausted to be glad, too wrapped up in the questions: Should she flee? Should she stay and surrender? She had guessed what the Allies would do to people in high positions like hers or her father’s. If she stayed in Essen, she would be arrested, and if she told them what she had done for the foreign workers in her care, they would think she was lying to save her skin. The thought of going to prison for the Nazis—the injustice of it had made her boil.

  As the detonations grew closer, she had bent over the sink in the office and cut off her blond hair. The dark roots were coming through, but she couldn’t be sure of the back of her head, and so, with shaking hands, she had shaved the rest. She hadn’t been willing to look at herself too closely in the mirror, and had ended up dabbing blood from cuts all over her head. Her backpack had been packed weeks before and hidden in a cabinet she had emptied of papers. At the time, it had been a month since Clara had heard from Papa. She had known the Russians were flooding toward him in Berlin, and the Americans toward her, and she had hoped he would run.

  Herr Berger fretted the corners of his handkerchief. “The British came at us with a thousand bombers. English bullies—” He stopped himself, looking penitent. “Sorry, fräulein. But what did they do? Pounded us to hell when the war was all but over. Know what I think? They had to use their bombs before it was too late. What’s the point of having bombs once a war is over? So they dumped them. Killed a thousand people that day. Women and children and older folk too. For nothing.”

  “What happened to Elisa . . . Frau Sieland?”

  “She got through the raid all right. I saw her outside with buckets trying to put out the flames. The house was still burning when . . .” He tossed a worried look at Frau Berger.

  “The soup is ready, fräulein,” she said too cheerfully.

  “When what? What happened?” Clara asked.

  The old man was dabbing his handkerchief at his lips again. “It was a bad time, fräulein. So much smoke. Was hard to see anything.”

  “See what?”

  The old man lowered his handkerchief and studied whatever encrusted it. “Well, they . . . came for Frau Sieland. To be honest, I knew they’d come and get her eventually. She was always out of the house at all hours, as if curfew and raids didn’t apply to her. Work, she’d say. But I ask you, what kind of work did she do that she’d slip in and out of the house in the middle of the night?”

  Clara rubbed her neck, feeling the hard knot of anxiety lodged there. “Herr Berger, you’re not making sense. Start at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”

  The Bergers couldn’t agree on how to tell it. Frau Berger started with a car, a great black car, surprised anyone had the gasoline, she said. “Who cares about the car?” Herr Berger interrupted. “It was two men, big brutes. They went straight for Frau Sieland while she was hauling water to her house. They wouldn’t even let her stay and see the fire put out.”

  “It wasn’t put out,” Frau Berger said, “it was impossible. Too big. And there were too many other fires. Now our house was—”

  “She argued with them. One of them took her arm but she yanked it right back, threw down her bucket, and went with them, quickly into the car like she wanted to get it over with.” Herr Berger shrugged. “That was it.”

  “Who were the men?” Clara demanded.

  Herr Berger picked at his lip. “Looked like Gestapo to me.”

  She had guessed as much. In the war, they would show up at her office accusing her of violating a regulation someone in Berlin had thought up the day before. The Gestapo men she’d had the misfortune to meet were overworked and not the brightest and she had managed to ignore them a good deal. They could smell disdain, though. She’d had to watch her step. Fortunately, there were never many Gestapo men in the city. More dangerous were the informants, people around her who might talk, people she knew. It was hard to trust anyone, but she could talk to Elisa. Max too—for a time. No one else knew what Elisa was doing to help the foreign workers as head of Falkenberg’s Housing Office. She had informed Clara about the inadequate food supply, the sanitary facilities in need of repair, the overcrowding in the labor camps, the epidemics of illness. Clara had made calls, demanding more resources from the government, more supplies, more medicines, and in the rare times she got them, it was Elisa who spirited them, secretly if necessary, to the workers in their barracks. Her arrest couldn’t have been because of that, or had they made a mistake? Given themselves away? Clara pictured Galina eating bread on the dusty floor, the line of young women contentedly smacking their lips in the shadows while Clara reminded them in whispers to keep their heads down, to avoid the windows, to talk only at night, and always quietly.

  At the oven, she rubbed her cold hands and tried to think of a likely explanation for what had happened to Elisa. “I’ll tell you what that was all about,” she said, thinking out loud. “Every time there was a bombardment, most of the foreign workers would stay at the Works or in their camps and help dig us out. But a few would take advantage of the chaos and go scave
nging in the city or run off. Once the Gestapo got wind of that, they’d march over to my office and demand to know what we were going to do about our workers stealing food and whatnot. I’m sure the same thing happened after the raid that day. They couldn’t find me or Max, so they picked up poor Elisa.”

  Everything she said had happened before. But she wasn’t at all sure it was true this time. The coincidence of the date—the bombardment that day, the same day Clara left the city—it seemed to mean something.

  “I’m sure she came back in a foul mood,” she said, her tone more confident than she felt. “Elisa hated dealing with the Gestapo as much as I did.”

  Behind her, the silence thickened, and she turned to see Herr Berger and his daughter-in-law exchanging a glance. “What is it?” Clara asked.

  The old man coughed into his handkerchief and Frau Berger began handing out soup to the children. “Fräulein, she never came back,” she said.

  Clara rustled the blankets on the empty bed, circled to the shelves where Elisa had stocked up for the raids, cans of everything imaginable, toilet paper, emergency flashlight and batteries. The shelves were nearly empty now, and there was nothing Clara remembered. “She must have come back. This is her house.”

  “We moved in as soon as the fires were out, fräulein. Been here ever since and haven’t heard a thing from her.”

  “What about Willy?” Clara asked. “What happened to Elisa’s son?”

  “Didn’t see him during the raid. I don’t think he was here when they came for Frau Sieland. We got a few bits of her mail once the mail was running again.” Frau Berger removed the envelopes from behind the rusted coffee can. “But it stopped soon after.”