On and on. The same tirade every time, until Liese’s jaw ached from clamping it. She didn’t want to fight him. She knew what was at the root: Michael couldn’t rescue Otto from the camp he was still held in, so he had to rescue everyone else. His urgency was easy to understand. His plan made perfect sense, for anyone but her. Michael and his network of KPD-loyal contacts were never still: they swam through the city, shifting location, changing their names as easily as shrugging on new coats. Pulling her self-involved parents into such a transient life was impossible. And then, with her pregnant, it became unthinkable.
When she finally admitted the truth of her condition, Michael’s transition from overzealous friend to pompous father had cracked her long-held patience in two.
‘I know it’s not ideal and André is the worst choice I could have made. Thank you for pointing that out with such eloquence. And I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, but if you tell me one more time that I can’t manage, our friendship is finished. I’m pregnant; I’m not incapable. I ran the business for nearly two years while you swanned round playing the rebel. I looked after everyone then. I can do the same now.’
Their row had blown up and spilled out and dragged Paul and Margarethe into the sea of judgement Liese refused to step into. Part of her wanted to walk out then; to let them sink or swim without dragging her down further. But the ties of family, however worn they were, still had enough bite to hold. So she had stayed. She had ignored her parents as they moaned and belittled her. She had taken charge.
The three of them could live at each other’s throats, but they couldn’t live for long on their dwindling stack of money, or rely on Michael’s handouts that came from goodness knows where. Fashion was all she knew, so Liese went back to Hausvogteiplatz, where the freshly Germanised fashion industry still operated, and came back with a job. She never told any of them what that had cost her. How it had ached to walk past Haus Elfmann and find it locked and barred, the windows cracked, the canopy in tatters. How it had stung to stand outside building after building whose names were once a supply-book shorthand and find them whitewashed and rechristened to fit a Germany that no longer had a place for people like her. How deep the humiliation of knocking on doors all along Mohrenstraβe and Kronenstraβe ran, doors that the Elfmann name would once have swung open, and having every one of them slam at the first sight of her papers.
Later, when Liese replayed the day for her parents, she scooped out its humiliations and let Paul believe it was her skills and their reputation that had triumphed. She let him think that the Elfmanns weren’t forgotten. She couldn’t hit him with the word charity, or admit that, by the time she heard a voice calling, not spitting at, her name, she had no pride left to bargain with.
‘Fraulein Elfmann! It is you! What are you doing outside in such dreadful cold?’
The fur-wrapped woman exiting from the coat-maker’s, whose receptionist Liese was about to join battle with, was all smiles, as if they had last met in a coffee shop the previous morning.
‘And what are you doing back here? We thought you had moved.’
Irena Zahl. Liese managed a smile as the name popped back. She had been one of the salon’s most extravagant customers, although not one who had stayed a moment past when she should.
Liese had opened her mouth to trot out something meaningless, but the day had scratched open too many scars.
‘No, we didn’t move. We were chased out, and the house and the salon and everything was taken. We have no money, so I’m looking for a job, but I’m Jewish, so there’s not one to be had.’
To Frau Zahl’s credit, she blushed. Then she came closer and inspected Liese’s pinched face and dirt-spattered coat, and she winced.
‘A job? But you’re not some common seamstress – you’re the heir to—’
She had stopped, coughed; pushed the shop door back open again.
‘You’re someone with skills any business would be lucky to have in their workplace. This showroom and the trade that goes with it belongs to my family now. I’m not going to pretend to you that is right. Let me see what can be done.’
Liese had begun sewing coat linings and collars that afternoon and had done the same eye-aching work ever since, until her body had grown too bulky to sit at the sewing table.
And as soon as Lottie is weaned, I will have to go back.
Liese stared at the sleeping baby, her heart aching at the thought of leaving her, but there were too many mouths depending on her skills to pretend she had any other choice.
‘What are you going to do now?’
Michael had turned away from the darkening window while Liese was fretting at the future and picking over the past. He held up his hands as she frowned.
‘Don’t jump down my throat. I’m not going to try and tell you what to do or give orders. I wouldn’t dare anymore. You’ve proved yourself stronger than most of the men I know.’
His smile was a shadow of the grin that used to turn his face boyish. That had disappeared with the one-line letter announcing Otto’s death and giving no reason. Or offering him a body to mourn with.
‘All I want is for you to be safe, Liese. Except I don’t see how you can be when you’re trapped in these streets that are too like a ghetto and worn thin trying to look after what amounts to three babies.’
There was too much truth in his words to dismiss them.
Liese could hear her parents moving about on the other side of the wall; she could hear the grumble that would steadily rise to a whine. ‘We’re hungry. What are we eating? Why have we waited long past what was always our dinner time?’ The daily complaints that took no account of long hours stitching in poor light or the grind of empty purses, or of giving birth. That cared only for their never-full-enough stomachs and did nothing to fill them. She imagined herself returning to the workroom, leaving Lottie to be watched over by her grandparents; to be neglected. It was as unimaginable as recovering their lost lives.
As the commentary on the lack of cooking smells grew louder, Lottie stirred in her makeshift cradle and began mewing. The soft sound caught at Liese’s heart as if a cord still ran between them. Nobody mattered anymore but Lottie. Nobody’s needs could come before hers.
‘Will you take a letter to Frau Zahl for me?’
She could see Michael wrestling with his previous promise not to direct her.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to keep trying to balance it all. There’s a real baby now; it’s time for everyone else to get up on their feet.’
She nodded to the opening door.
‘They can’t be my problem to manage anymore. They’re going to have to start pulling their weight.’
She reached into the makeshift cradle and stroked Lottie’s cheek.
‘If they want to eat, if they want to live here, they’re going to have to stop acting like royalty, rethink their lives and work.’
Eight
Liese
Berlin, September 1940–October 1941
‘Hush now, sweetheart; don’t be afraid.’
Liese settled the wriggling baby against her shoulder and wondered who her words were meant to calm. Lottie never cried when the sirens sounded; she barely flinched when the bombs fell. The war’s first air-raid alarm had shrieked across the city a year ago, in the early weeks of the little girl’s life, and had remained its music. Three long tones, a wail and a howl. The endlessly repeating pattern rattled Liese’s bones; Lottie could chirp it like a song.
‘Watch the pretty lights now.’
Another unnecessary instruction. Lottie’s arms were already out, her fingers curling to catch the red and green flares floating like fireflies past the smudged glass and trace the searchlights’ silvery webs. It wasn’t the nightly lights or noise that unnerved the little girl, it was silence. When the raids stopped, or in the pauses in between the night’s onslaughts, then her eyes grew wide and she started to babble, only settling when Liese cooed and whispered nonsense into her ear. Lottie was a war baby
, the whole of her short life shaped by the conflict’s sounds and cruelties. If Liese regretted anything about her daughter’s coming, it was that.
Two o’clock.
Almost twenty minutes since the last shards of shrapnel had clattered like metallic rain across the windowsill. Perhaps the all-clear would sound in time to snatch at least a semblance of sleep.
Liese lay Lottie on the narrow fold-down bed they shared, starting up a soothing hum as she wrapped the thin blanket round the child’s not-plump-enough body.
‘The windows and the building have survived another onslaught, so that was lucky.’
She began to list the night’s blessings as Lottie chafed against the sudden quiet.
‘And the ban on Jews using the shelters saved us from a blackout trek, which was even luckier. You know Mummy hates the thought of going underground more than any silly old bomb crashing through the apartment.’
The final siren sang out; Lottie’s eyelids fell.
Liese eased gently away from the bed and crossed the few paces back to the window. The light show was over; the streets already disappearing back into the dark. Liese shivered as she looked down into the spreading blackness, although the night was warm.
Berlin without its necklace of lights was an oppressive place. Darkness fell on the city, solid and matte. The soft glow of street lamps was a memory. The roads and pavements were marked instead by phosphorescent paint whose spiky daubs reared like fangs. Stripes for kerbs, corners and crossings; zigzags for a flight of steps. Each sign roughly done and patchy, a trap for a too-quick foot.
Nothing in the blackout held the shape it should. Bodies shuffled past each other sexless and hunched, grunting on contact. Buses lumbered along with their windows tinted into slit-thin blue patches. War had turned Berlin subterranean. And suspicious. Even in daylight, nobody spoke in the street unless they had to. Communication had whittled down to nods and eye rolls, to covertly watching and quickly looking away. The Germany preened over by the radio and the headlines and the flag-choked parades wasn’t one Liese recognised. That one wore its head up and its shoulders wide. Liese’s Berlin was all shadows and tightening spaces.
Three o’clock.
She could hear the bedroom stirring. Another hour and her parents would be up, forced out of bed before they were ready, sitting at the age-scarred table, hoping for breakfast. Facing a far too long walk to the jobs that had swallowed their lives.
I can’t find a place in our workshop for them, I’m sorry – no one needs the level of attention Paul Elfmann’s presence would bring.
Liese had despaired when she read the first line of Frau Zahl’s response to the letter Michael had delivered. The second line, however, had offered the hope of a lifeline: a promise of help to secure her parents positions in a uniform factory happy to pay a pittance to desperate Jews. It was a hard fall for them, but Liese, aching at Lottie’s hungry cries, had stood firm against Paul and Margarethe’s tears and protests. She had pointed out the rapidly expanding forced-labour laws, which were already sending Jews to grub in quarries and at building sites and roadworks. ‘To work at jobs you won’t survive in.’ She had insisted, and held food back from them as a promise of what would come unless they listened, until they ran out of arguments.
Threats had pushed the Elfmanns out of the flat and into sparsely filled wage packets. Threats got them through days that left them too drained to bombard Liese with their old litany of complaints.
Exhaustion had aged Paul and Margarethe ten years in the one since the war had started. Lack of light in the factory shed had yellowed their skin and reduced Paul’s once bright eyes to peering. Margarethe’s inability to sew a straight seam had sent her to the damp potato mountains which passed for a work’s kitchen. Her slim fingers had grown lumpen and knotted and they split any gloves she tried to force over them. Their days were ruled by eight-hour shifts and a five-kilometre walk there and back that soon became a shuffle.
Liese had tried to get bus passes for them, not that they believed her, but none were available for Jews – ‘with a journey so short, they ought to be grateful’. Her stomach dropped every day at the sight of their blank faces and soured with guilt at what she had forced them to do. Then she looked in the empty cupboard and her stomach dropped further. Her parents were broken and Liese felt the weight of her part in that. If their misery meant Lottie cried with hunger for even one moment less, it was, however, a cross she would bear.
Food. The lack of it and the need for it dominated every waking hour. Liese’s fan of ration cards were as pretty as a paint chart and as much use at filling empty stomachs. The Party had put a well-regimented system in place to ensure Germany’s increasingly stretched resources were best used: blue cards for meat; green for eggs; yellow for fats; orange for bread; and pink for rice and tea and flour and oatmeal. It was a system capable of providing German citizens with a perfectly balanced diet. If only the cards Liese held weren’t stamped with a J. If only the shops were open to Jews for longer than the last scrabbling moments before the shutters slammed down for the day. If only the portions allocated to anyone but ‘honest Germans’ would feed anything bigger than a mouse.
Liese had mined every connection like a prospector after gold. Lottie’s smile had charmed the childless grocer’s wife: if Liese came to the shop early and tickled Lottie into a grin, she could leave a bag that would be filled up with vegetables when she returned later at night. The women whose sewing Liese took in shared a twist of sugar when they could, or a straw-wrapped egg. The women whose children she minded along with Lottie, while they toiled in the factories, did the same. Michael would pop up every week or two clutching a bag of apples, or a knuckle of pork, and no questions asked. She was grateful for all of it, but none of it was guaranteed.
There were days when all Liese could pull together was a handful of turnips and a dry loaf of bread so full of grit she was terrified Lottie would choke on it. She became a more inventive cook than any of the chefs whose meals she once ate without thinking. She became a gleaner, a collector of rosehips and dandelions and nettles that went into salads and soups that everyone hated and everyone wolfed down.
Whatever she did, it was never enough. Lottie’s eyes were a shade too big for her face, her arms and legs not properly covered. When the second word she spoke after Mama was hungry, Liese sank down and wept.
Four o’clock.
The bedroom door would open soon, the hungry mouths would appear. A hot drink might provide the illusion of a proper breakfast.
Liese collected the box of ersatz coffee that tasted of chicory and smelled burned when it brewed and went to the cramped kitchen. It was so early, at least one of the stove’s four flickering burners should be free. The corridor was bitterly cold, the stained oilcloth that covered it stung like ice through Liese’s thin shoes and its one light bulb had blown long ago. There was no milk, not that she would have given that to anyone but Lottie. There was a heel of yesterday’s loaf, a scraping of beet-bulked marmalade. That would do for Paul and Margarethe.
Hidden under the bed where Lottie lay sleeping was a muslin-wrapped square inch of cheese, a bag with two apples and some slivers of meat the black-market man swore was fresh rabbit. That haul would stay hidden until her parents were far away from the flat. It had cost Liese her last pair of earrings and would be gone within minutes. But it would fill Lottie up. It would pink her cheeks and wipe away the pinched hollows for a few hours, for a morning. For long enough to keep going from this day to the next.
‘Where have they got to, poppet? It’s almost curfew time.’
Lottie looked up from the bed, where she was putting the rag doll Liese had sewn from scraps through a complicated set of jumps and twirls. She grinned.
‘Dinner time?’
Liese scooped her daughter up, trying not to dwell on how easy that task was: two years living on steadily depleting resources had left Lottie with no more substance to her than a pocket full of feathers.
&nb
sp; ‘Mama sad?’
Liese smiled her frown away and tickled Lottie back into laughter. Too much time cooped up, forbidden access to parks or play spaces, or pinned to Liese’s side for lack of anyone else to mind her, had made Lottie far more conscious of her mother’s moods than any child ought to be.
‘Not sad, monkey, hungry like you. Dinner time then. But you’ll have to come with me to the kitchen, and you’ll have to be good. No getting under people’s feet or pinching food that doesn’t belong to us. Do you promise?’
‘Promise.’
The little girl’s face was solemn, but Liese knew how fast the child’s fingers could flash if she thought no one was looking. She also knew she should tell Lottie that thieving was wrong, that everyone else in the building was just as hungry as they were. But it was her child she heard sobbing in the night when her empty stomach hurt, and her child whose tear-stained hollow cheeks she had to wipe clean every morning, so the guilt came but not the words.
The kitchen was only one turn of the corridor away, but it was a cumbersome operation to get there. Collecting up the food bag and the cooking pot and spoon; balancing that load with Lottie’s insistence on helping; making sure everything was locked tight behind her. Liese couldn’t leave anything in the communal space for fear of fingers as quick as Lottie’s, and she couldn’t leave their flat open. By some miracle, or some oversight, the Elfmanns had held on to their two rooms while the rest of the building was carved smaller and smaller. No one had said anything against the Elfmanns yet. That didn’t mean that no one – broken by the terrible conditions they were all forced to endure and desperate for some space and dignity for their own family – would.
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 15
