Of Love and Other Wars

by Sophie Hardach

  There were shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ Esther half expected them to carry her across the room on their shoulders. She was the darling of the lab again, the spoiled wonder girl, the pet. She hopped on the floor, stumbled a little, was quickly steadied by gallant hands.

  And to think I once sold shoes in Passau, she heard Gottfried say. He said it every time he succeeded at something in the lab, though she could not remember whether he had in fact ever sold shoes or whether it was some German saying. When she had sent him her congratulations on the Nobel Prize, he had added a mischievous handwritten addition to the pat thank you note: ‘And to think I once sold shoes in Passau.’

  Esther was about to tell the others about this famous man’s little quirk when the door at the other end of the lab opened. She could just glimpse the expression on the Wizard’s face as he stared at the Nobel medal on the shelf. The door closed and she was left with the excited faces around her, fizzing with eagerness to get to work and do their absent peer justice.

  3

  Everything sparkled at the lab. Everything reflected the light. And she herself sparkled, too; and was in the light once more.

  Belgium was invaded and at home the mood was one of dull, dark mourning, as if all the mirrors and all the silver had been covered. Sometimes when she turned the key in the lock she was so tired and the house was so quietly sad that she could not tell whether she was stepping into the house in Hampstead in 1940 or the house in Hatton Garden in 1918. Her husband acted as if the Germans were already in Kent and even persuaded her to procure four vials of morphine from a medic at the institute for the worst case. She felt repelled by his defeatism now, yet could not deny that his general yielding softness had been very useful to her once. At night the carousel of dread and regret turned and turned in her head, but when the sun rose she dressed without washing and went to the bright world of the laboratory without even waking Mr Morningstar.

  Let other women be wives, mothers, sisters. Esther had no time for domesticity. Let other people be defeatists. Esther was neither numbed nor subdued by the fall of Belgium. Even the worry over her relatives in Antwerp did not paralyse her. Let others sit in gloom and fear, like medieval peasants awaiting the marauders. She was alive and ready for battle. There was nothing supernatural about the speed and force of the German assault. It was a function of the quantity and quality of their tanks, bombs, planes and ships. If they met an opposing force greater than their own, they would be pushed back. Her one task was to help increase that opposing force.

  The clarity and precision of her purpose filled her with an optimistic vigour she had known only twice before: when she first joined the Wizard’s lab, and before that, when she had promised Nathan to help him make a packet.

  4

  Esther arrived at the lab and did not immediately spot what was wrong. The muted atmosphere, the nervous glances were not unusual these days. She walked past the men with spectrometers; her current work was mostly theoretical. When she passed the glass cabinet she glanced at the stand in quiet triumph as she did every morning and only then did she see that the medal was gone.

  ‘Where is it?’

  A few men glanced at each other. No one spoke.

  ‘Where is the Nobel prize medal?’

  Not long ago she had been the darling of the laboratory once again. Now she relived another role she knew too well. Here she caught a smirk, there a shifty look. They were all in league. Her voice reached that high pitch she loathed, and which they must think of as typically female, uncontrolled, with a touch of hysteria.

  ‘Did any of you take it? It was entrusted to me. It was entrusted to me by Mr von der Weide, our friend and colleague Mr von der Weide, prisoner in a Nazi gaol. I hope you all understand that this is not some trinket you can use for your pranks.’

  The schoolmarm’s tone earned her a roomful of resentment.

  ‘The Wizard has it,’ one of the men said without looking up.

  ‘Does he indeed? It’s not his Nobel prize,’ she snapped, and there it was: the summary, the reason why the Wizard hated von der Weide and hated the medal, and now hated her for having accepted his offer and then put the medal in its rightful place.

  ‘The Wizard didn’t win the prize. The Wizard has, as you may have noticed, never won a Nobel Prize. This medal belongs to Gottfried von der Weide, who took great risks to—’

  Turning her head, she saw the open door, the tufts of white hair, the Wizard’s expressionless face.

  ‘Miss Adler, if you wouldn’t mind seeing me in my study . ⁠. ⁠.’

  She did not correct him.

  *

  ‘Thank you for reminding us all that I have never found favour with the Nobel committee,’ he said with an awful smile. ‘It’s interesting to see that this is all you measure someone’s work by. How would you evaluate your own achievements by that standard? I hear you taught a very successful statistics course for accountants at Bentham College. Perhaps it was selfish of me to disrupt such a promising career?’

  She sat in the green armchair. He slouched on a swivel chair by his desk. The woven brown wallpaper had not changed, nor had the olive-green curtains with the pattern of rhomboids. She half expected to hear a muffled cough from the next room.

  He looks like a glutton, she thought, like a glutton who swallows all he sees and desires. He had fed on his students, on their adoration and their need to please, and had grown monstrously fat on them over the years. And she . ⁠. ⁠. she had shrivelled up like a hard, bitter plum, all the juice of her youthful hopes and ambitions gone. His scorn did not touch her; there was nothing for it to touch.

  ‘So, Mrs Morningstar, you suspect me of having pocketed the medal for my own profit?’

  ‘I never—’

  ‘You did not for one moment consider that I had good reasons?’

  She told herself not to apologize. He would sack her, he would force Bentham College to sack her too, but it did not matter, she would not apologize.

  ‘Let me put it this way, Mrs Morningstar. What do you think the Germans will do if they invade Britain and find a Nobel medal in my lab that bears the name of a political prisoner back in Berlin?’ He moved the curtain aside with the back of his hand and gazed over the domes and spires of Westminster. ‘Not to mention what it would mean for poor Gottfried. I don’t think having smuggling added to his many charges is quite what he had in mind when he sent you the medal for safekeeping.’

  She tried to hold her ground. ‘The Germans haven’t invaded Britain yet. We shouldn’t act as if they have.’

  ‘Some might say it’s important to take precautions. I am sure, my dear, that you have taken yours.’ And his eyes flickered over to her for a moment before returning to the view.

  The comment silenced her. She felt cowardly, ashamed; the medic must have told him about the vials of morphine.

  ‘Where are you going to hide it?’ she asked quietly. ‘Mr von der Weide will want it back one day, and I would like at least to be able to lead him to where you’ve buried it.’

  The Wizard withdrew his hand and let the curtain swing back. He pulled an encyclopaedia from the shelf behind the armchair, opened it and let the medal hidden in its hollowed-out pages drop heavily into her lap.

  ‘Bury it?’ His stomach was at her eye height but she refused to flinch. ‘Bury it where? In my wife’s kitchen garden? In the institute’s courtyard? Have you heard of the Gestapo and the SS, Mrs Morningstar? Have you heard what they do when they raid a house?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with slow emphasis, ‘I have indeed.’

  For a moment, that shut him up. Then he sighed and said: ‘You see, I was going to melt it down in the lab and donate the gold to the war effort. But you’re quite right, he sent it to you, and I shall let you take care of it. My advice would of course be to melt it down, but it’s your choice. You may hide it in your house if you wish, though if that’s what you choose to do, I would ask you cut your ties with this institute. I have two dozen researchers under
me, men with families and decent lives that I must protect. You may leave us and do as you please, or stay with us and destroy the thing. I would call that a fair deal, and frankly, not one to agonize over. It’s a slice of metal, for Christ’s sake, not a person.’

  *

  Back in the lab, the men avoided her. She remembered that it had been like that during her very first week, so many years ago. On her first day they had assumed her to be the tea girl, someone’s wife, a seamstress in the wrong building. Even after she put on her white lab coat, they continued to ask her for cups of tea. There were crude jokes, hostile mutterings about homely spinsters who would be better off knitting socks for the boys in Flanders. Only Gottfried had been nice to her. She remembered an evening in the empty lab. A trembling hand set down a mug of tea next to her spectrometer.

  They always ask you to make tea, so tonight I thought, maybe I will make a tea for her for a change.

  He had reminded her of her brother Simon. Something about the shy pudginess, the tremor. Yet when he fixed a crystal on a metal thorn his hand was as steady as a surgeon’s.

  Her notes lay before her, columns of data to be gutted. She smoothed the paper with her hand, and it trembled more than Gottfried’s. ‘Applications of mathematical statistics to the assessment of the efficacy of bombing’ by E. Morningstar.

  Only the day before, the Wizard had told her that her research was much appreciated, had been read in the highest circles and found to be very useful indeed. Statistics for Freshers had not been such a waste of time after all.

  If she did not destroy the medal, she would have to leave the lab just when her life finally had some meaning and purpose again, when things were finally fitting together again. She told herself that she must stop trying to connect all the best and worst moments of her life, must stop trying to fit it all into a pattern, but already the carousel in her head was turning again, already she was letting the present yield once more towards the past, and her white-coated lab colleagues hunched over their spectrometers became tall gaunt cutters bent over their spinning scaifes.

  5

  Mrs Morningstar decided to consult Max before mentioning the medal to her husband and daughter. After all, he had personally witnessed more than one Nazi raid. Max rarely spoke about Berlin, but once, when she had helped him write a letter to a potential British sponsor for his mother, he had described to her in his slow, precise way how her shop had been looted. The upturned drawers, the smashed wood panelling, the bruises on her face in the morning. If he thought hiding it at home was too dangerous, she would melt it down right away, and the rest of the family need never know about it.

  She pulled Max aside one evening when the others were out. He listened to her clipped explanations while turning the medal in his long thin hands. Something seemed to upset him.

  ‘You must have heard of Gottfried von der Weide,’ she said.

  ‘Physics is such a mystery to me,’ he said with a strange stiff smile, and handed her the medal. ‘I suppose the name rings a bell. Yes, I suppose I saw it in the paper once.’

  But it must do more than ring a bell, she wanted to say. You’re the son of a German physicist. And she could see that he knew this was what she wanted to say, and knew, too, that she would not say it, because Max’s father was a subject that could not be mentioned.

  Instead, she told him about the Wizard’s concerns. Max nodded, and said in an impartial tone that this was quite true; if the medal was found at their house after a German invasion, they would all be taken away and interrogated.

  ‘Enough,’ she said decisively. ‘I’m sorry I came to you with this hare-brained idea. Professor Littlewood is of course right – it’s a medal, not a person. I’ll melt it down myself in the lab.’

  His rigidly composed expression cracked, and he grabbed her wrist hard and cried: ‘Please don’t melt it down.’

  ‘Max! It’s too dangerous to keep it here, you’ve said so yourself.’

  ‘I know. And if you ask me what the sensible thing would be, well, you should melt it down. But if you ask me to speak from my soul, I would ask you not to. I can’t explain the reason, it’s how I feel. It would seem like another punishment to Mr von der Weide.’

  ‘Well, I feel that way, too, otherwise I wouldn’t have kept it safe in the first place. But we can’t put ourselves into danger for some Swedish gold. I don’t think that’s what Gottfried would want.’

  ‘Then why did he give it to you? He gave it to you, not to one of his friends in Göttingen or Heidelberg or Passau, because he knows you will keep it safe for him. And please do that, please keep it safe for him.’ He held out his hands. ‘Or I will keep it safe myself.’

  ‘That’s out of the question.’ She put it in her pocket. ‘I’ll try to think of something. I promise you I’ll do my best to find a place for it. And then let’s pretend I never showed you the medal.’

  *

  A few days later she mentioned to the Wizard in passing that she had followed his advice.

  ‘I think our friend from Heidelberg will understand,’ she said in a tone that was meant to make it sound like a light and insignificant act.

  It was only then that she realized what had been so odd about Max’s reaction. ‘He did not give his medal to one of his friends in Göttingen or Heidelberg,’ he had said, ‘or Passau.’ The first two towns were well known and he might have used them as figures of speech, as a way of saying, ‘friends at famous universities’. But Passau? How could Max possibly know Gottfried’s little joke about selling shoes in Passau?

  The Teapot

  1

  Grace and Max cut the children’s hair. The girls were given sporty bobs; the boys, shaved necks and floppy fringes. Grace herself experimented with a fashionable fringe. It made her look a little more playful, and she had a feeling that Morten might like it. He would run his fingers through it, perhaps, or gently blow it from her forehead.

  There were not many children left at Samhuinn. Most had found homes, or at least farmhouses in need of labour. When Inge’s turn came, Grace had to restrain herself from letting the pair of scissors slip a little, just enough to snip away that awful, ratty string. The cardboard name tag was long gone, dissolved by rain and soapy water. The string clung on.

  The scissors clipped neatly around Inge’s thin neck, through her mousy hair, as thin and dully brown as Grace’s. She saw herself in Inge’s reserved earnestness, in the stern silence that was so unusual in a child. Inge looked at herself in the mirror and frowned. Grace pouted.

  ‘Are you saying you don’t like my work?’

  ‘It’s not your work that I don’t like,’ Inge said. ‘It’s my face.’

  ‘You have a lovely face.’

  ‘My brother looks much nicer. That’s why Mama kept him with her.’

  She hooked her finger around the grey string and pulled at it so it cut into the soft skin on her neck.

  *

  It was hard to believe that the blue dorms had once seen happy children, wild chases down the yellow corridor so loud they brought up sour teachers from the floor below. Now the mood was anxious, cowering. Like little mice in little mouse-holes, Grace thought.

  Inge had taken to placing small pieces of cheese before the mouse-holes in the kitchen. The other children copied her. No amount of scolding from Grace and Max could deter them. When the cook put out traps, the children sabotaged them with sticks. Once they left out a pan of grease overnight. It was crisscrossed by tiny paw prints in the morning.

  ‘These are not currants, I think,’ Max said after staring into his bowl of nature-cure oat flakes for five minutes. He shoved the bowl aside and told the cook to put out more traps.

  They had discussed whether the children ought to be exposed to news from the Continent. Max said there was no point in trying to protect them: it was better for them to know.

  Grace missed the music-hall performances in her doorframe. No more glimpses of Max carrying pine cones, paperbacks, fir branches that scattered n
eedles all the way down the corridor. He barricaded himself into a storage room behind the kitchen and dived into some frantic correspondence that she dared not ask about. His face grew gaunt and his ears protruded even more prominently. He looked more than anything like a tragic clown, a broken rag doll.

  She tried not to disturb him. They rarely spoke, and the shy camaraderie that had emerged around Christmas faded and was replaced by awkwardness. She longed to ask him what the matter was, whether he had received bad news from Berlin, but the question was too daft at a time when there was nothing but bad news from Berlin; what other news could there be?

  Only once did she venture into the storage room. It was after the hairdressing session. She remained in the doorway, half in, half out.

  ‘I was wondering if I could ask your advice on something.’

  ‘Anytime.’

  ‘It’s about Inge.’

  He nodded.

  ‘It’s the fact that she insists on wearing that string around her neck. I can see why she does it. She has some idea that her parents will find her. It’s become some sort of symbol of loyalty. But I’m not sure it’s healthy. In fact, I worry that it’s downright unhealthy. And I was wondering . ⁠. ⁠. well, I was wondering if I ought to, you know, accidentally snip it off next time I cut her hair.’