Liese read the typed note through to the end while Andrew sat quietly beside her.
‘It’s a declaration of intent to marry. British soldiers wishing to marry German citizens are required to make them.’
‘I know what it is. It’s not the words I don’t understand.’
Her voice shook. She couldn’t stop it shaking. Or her hands. Herr Herber had sent her home on Monday and again on Tuesday, fearful she was starting a fever. If she told him about the dizzy spells, about the hallucinations, about the square shape that kept flickering into the shop and fading out as she turned, he would be convinced of it. If she broke down like she wanted and told him what she had done, how many would she drag behind her to the gallows?
‘It’s an insurance policy.’
Liese struggled to surface from the shop floor’s horrors. Andrew’s voice had changed into Michael’s. Increasingly, she found she couldn’t tell one man apart from the other.
‘In case the body is found. Which it won’t be. But if it is, this keeps us safe.’
She picked up the neatly lined sheet of cream-coloured paper. It was signed by Andrew, witnessed by Michael; officially stamped. It looked weighty, like it already carried their vows. She was still missing something.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. How does getting married keep me safe? If she’s found and identified, if she’s somehow linked to me, a change of name won’t matter.’
So many ifs. And so many promises.
It will all go to plan, don’t worry. The connection between you and her is too thin to see. Go back to work at once on Monday morning, no matter how impossible that sounds. Act normally and this will pass. You are not alone in this.
Michael making his claims as confidently as Andrew. Both of them convinced she believed their keep-the-future-safe wishes would work. Didn’t they understand that she had taken a life? That crimes as dreadful as that left deep stains and had to be punished? She forced herself to stop shivering and to focus on understanding this latest twist in their plan.
‘You said that, even if the worst happened and the husband was traced, he must know his wife was a Nazi and he wouldn’t want that coming out. If that’s true, surely he won’t want to stir up publicity. So what’s changed?’
Andrew slipped the certificate out of her hands and smoothed it back out.
‘Nothing, except that we’ve had more time to think. The Ravensbrück trial has put the spotlight on the crimes that were done in the camp. Yes, the husband would be a fool to come forward and make a fuss over her death. But others could hold grudges and might recognise old photos of her if any were published. And Suhren called out your name at the camp, Liese; he linked you to Lottie’s killing even if that wasn’t his intention. That may have registered with someone.’
She could see the logic, but it didn’t answer her question about where the idea of marriage had come from. She stared from one face to the other and, for the first time since the guard’s killing, the two men separated out.
‘I don’t understand. Why marriage? And why you?’
Why not the right one?
It hung in the air even though she hadn’t said it.
Andrew looked away.
It was Michael who answered her question, although he sounded like he was reading instructions.
‘If you marry Andrew, he can take you to England. If it falls out like Andrew said it might, you wouldn’t be safe in Germany.’
‘England?’
The idea was so ridiculous, she couldn’t find a question to fit it.
Michael sat back and let Andrew step in. He tried a smile, but his face was as exhausted as Michael’s.
‘It’s the safest place. You killed a mother, Liese. You told us: she had two babies of her own. If you’re caught, you will hang. We would face prison at the very least, but you would definitely hang. I know that you don’t care much for living, but the thing is, we can’t live with your death. At the state’s hands or your own. If that makes us selfish, so be it.’
It was the first time Andrew had directly acknowledged how deep her pain ran, or what it could lead to. Liese couldn’t meet his eyes.
‘I’m sorry…’
She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She was sorry for killing a woman with two children. She was sorry for all the unhappiness that would inevitably follow her actions. She was sorry she had put Michael and Andrew in danger. She wasn’t sorry the woman was dead. She didn’t know how to put any of that into words. Andrew, as always, spared her the effort.
‘Don’t worry. We’re simply making plans to deal with whatever eventuality arises, that’s all.’
Plans, nothing more; we won’t need to act on them.
Liese forced herself to look properly at Andrew. He was so solid. His words might echo Bardou’s, but the two men shared nothing else. She could lean on him, on his quiet confidence, and know that, unlike everyone else, whether they meant to or not, he’d never let her down. That held such comfort in it. But she couldn’t love him, not in the way he deserved, which meant she couldn’t marry him. She thought that her silence every time he had spoken about the future had told him that. She had never wanted to hurt him.
And yet perhaps by letting him keep hope alive, I already have.
‘Andrew, please. You know how much you mean to me, but this? I can’t—’
Andrew shook his head. ‘There’s no need to say what doesn’t need to be said.’
He picked up the marriage declaration and put it in his pocket.
‘It’s insurance, something to make us all feel safer. It won’t be required.’
Until, as Liese knew it inevitably would be, it was.
‘Two visitors, Fraulein Ettinger? It’s a good thing the snow has kept our customers away this morning or I would have to scold you.’
Liese didn’t need to leave the kitchen when Frau Herber’s tight voice called her, or see the men’s pale faces, to know that the body had been found.
She fetched her coat. The three of them walked without speaking to a quiet café on the Kurfürstendamm.
Michael waited until they were seated and their coffee was poured before he broke the news.
‘They pulled her out yesterday, at Lindenufer, just below Spandau, where the Spree meets the Havel. One of my contacts at the police bureau there told me the news this morning. We still have a number of female comrades missing; he thought it might be one of them. It’s unusual, even in Berlin, to find a woman whose clothes suggest she is of good standing murdered. It will make the papers tomorrow.’
Liese stirred her coffee round and round, waiting for Andrew to speak. She presumed they would have divided the story between them.
‘The body got caught in a reed bed and came up with the January thaw.’
Andrew kept his eye on the waitress wandering between the half-empty tables as he spoke.
‘It was simple bad luck. Another mile down the river and we would have been clear.’
Simple bad luck: it felt more like a judgement.
‘All this time, she was so close. Barely ten miles away.’
Liese caught the glance that ran between the two men, saw them steel themselves in case she collapsed. She felt instead strangely calm, relieved in fact that the waiting was over. Eight weeks and one day. Fifty-seven mornings, fifty-six nights. So much willpower harnessed to move herself through them. She could feel her head lolling. She knew that tonight, as crazy as it sounded, she would sleep.
‘They will trace her back to me, won’t they? In the end?’
Michael looked away; Andrew nodded.
‘It’s not certain, but I think the odds against it have shrunk. There’s been so much reported at the trial about the guards’ cruelty; about the brutality they used so easily against the prisoners. There’s a lot of anger at how many of those women got away. Even in a place as dreadful as Ravensbrück, Lottie’s murder must have stood out. And you said there was a noticeable scar on the guard’s hand. She will be id
entified from it. However her husband tries to downplay what she was, someone will remember her; someone will step forward.’
Michael slammed his cup down and swore as coffee splashed across the table.
‘They should give you a medal.’
The waitress looked up but clearly thought better of coming over.
Liese reached out and slipped her hand round his. His fingers were stiff and cold. When he spoke, his voice choked and turned him back to the boy she used to tease in the salon.
‘It should have been us, Liese. Marrying, building a future. Giving Lottie brothers and sisters, the way that we planned. All of this, every cruel twist of this, is my fault.’
He was wrong, but the time for arguing over it had long passed.
She squeezed his hand as hard as she could. She couldn’t stay and risk the danger that would put him in. She couldn’t watch him suffer anymore; she knew he would never leave her or stop trying to protect her, not unless she forced his hand. So, despite the pain she knew it would cost, she had to make him go.
‘If they come for me, they’ll find you two. What you did will come out. I cannot bear to see either of you punished. That is all that has kept me going. That is what has stopped me doing anything else that would bring attention, from the police, from a coroner.’ She held on as Michael flinched. ‘I don’t care that much about me anymore – you know that. But I can’t let anything happen to either of you.’
‘Then choose me.’
She heard Andrew’s strangled gasp but she couldn’t think about that; she couldn’t be distracted or let Andrew’s voice in. She focused instead on Michael’s face. The distress in his eyes took her breath away, but she forced herself to stay steady.
‘I’m good at hiding, Liese – you know that. Or maybe we don’t need to hide. We could go to Russia with the connections I have, start again there. I can keep you safe. I love you. I can look after you, I promise.’
I promise. The two words that were all Liese needed to push him safely away.
She kept hold of his hand and she lied, for all three of them.
‘I don’t love you, Michael. I can’t. There are too many broken promises already between us. There are too many shadows.’
It worked. Michael got up and stormed away; Liese let him. She stayed upright; she stayed dry-eyed – she couldn’t allow herself to feel. She took what comfort she could in the knowledge that this would keep Michael away from prison and the shadow of a noose; it would keep him safe and free to start a new life.
She slipped her shaking hands under the table and turned to Andrew. He was watching her, his body so still it was as if he had frozen. If he understood the truth of what had just happened, of the sacrifice she had just made, he gave no sign.
‘How long will the arrangements for the wedding and our leaving take?’
‘A month at the outside. It will need a minimum of two weeks to organise your travel permit and passport. We have the permissions in place, which speeds everything up. I’m due to leave Germany shortly; I can request that moves up quicker. And I’ve found a church for the wedding that’s suitable. If that’s all right? I can change it, if that was presumptuous.’
He suddenly sounded as hesitant as a schoolboy.
Liese dug deep and found him a smile. ‘I’m sure it will be fine. Put it all in motion. There’s no sense in delaying. I’ll hand in my notice tomorrow. I’ll be ready.’
The relief in his sigh almost unfroze her. That and the brightness in his eyes he hid by busying himself with the bill. He was happy. He was too sensitive to the danger that still threatened – and to her – to show it, but Andrew was happy.
Liese waited while he fussed with the change and the correct amount for the tip and forced herself to breathe, calmly and slowly. She wouldn’t insult him by faltering.
The risks these men had taken. She hadn’t asked them to; she hadn’t wanted them to. All she had wanted was for them to let her finish her story the way that she chose.
And you could have made sure of that; you could have pushed them away, but you didn’t.
She had clung to them, because she needed them and, in very different ways, she had cared for them. Now she had to pay that debt along with the rest.
They got up from the table; Andrew helped her on with her coat.
He’s doing this out of love. Because he is happy and he has hope.
Liese slipped her hand into his and chose to be glad at that.
She focused on the goodness that was Andrew and clung to that choice as hard as she could through the whirlwind weeks of preparations that followed.
When nothing about the body appeared in the press beyond the fact of its discovery, she turned the choice into a promise, into a charm. She wrapped herself up in its hope like a cloak and hid behind it. From Michael’s misery at the sparsely attended wedding she had told him not to attend but he couldn’t keep away from. Through the shock of a windblown crossing across a sea far greyer than any lake. Through lonely days in a hostile village where her accent was enough to make backs turn.
Andrew is happy. I choose to be glad at that. Andrew deserves that, so my choice is enough.
A promise, a charm, a spell. After a year in England she had worn the words thin, but she kept on repeating them, praying that, one day, every last bit of them might turn out to be true.
Sixteen
Karen
Aldershot, May 1990
He didn’t look at her. He made a space between them on the bench so they wouldn’t touch. He spoke steadily, with a speed which didn’t offer pauses into which questions could leap. The economy and efficiency of her father’s telling was as marked as Michael’s.
‘The guard came into the dressmaker’s shop where your mother was working. She didn’t know Liese; Liese killed her. It wasn’t planned. Michael and I disposed of the body, but not well enough. It was found and identified. We didn’t think Germany was a safe place for Liese to be after that, so I married her and brought her to England. The burden of it all, in the end, was too much.’
When he finished, his voice finally broke into what they both knew was a sob. He turned it into a cough and wouldn’t meet Karen’s eye.
‘Believe me, I never wanted to tell you. I didn’t even want to tell you about Lottie. But this? It wasn’t who your mother was. It really wasn’t who she was.’
The sparse recounting had taken no time. The croquet game was still in full swing behind them on the lawn. The sun didn’t appear to have moved through the sky. Nothing in the day’s summery mood had altered the way that it should. There were no lowering clouds, no shadows extending creeping fingers over the grass; the temperature hadn’t dropped from the gentle warmth it had held when Andrew started.
And yet my father just told me that my mother was a murderer.
No theory that she and Markus could have imagined would ever have come close to this. The need for the solidity of his arms overwhelmed her, rushing back jumbled memories of Berlin. First of Markus and then, hard behind them, an older one. A time capsule of a shop and a sour-faced old woman.
‘I was there. At the dressmaker’s shop. It’s called Richters now. I found it when I went to Berlin in 1978 with the school. I stood in the place where it happened.’
He didn’t react; he looked too drained to react to anything. He looked like he wanted to run.
‘Why did she kill her?’
It was the most inadequate question. Karen wasn’t even sure why she asked it or what answer there could be except ‘Lottie’. But she had to say something: if she didn’t, if her father – who was poised on the edge of the bench – walked away, this revelation would disappear into the silence they were so practised at living in. So she opened her mouth and said the first thing that came into it. As it had done with Michael, her simple directness worked on Andrew like a key.
‘Revenge.’ Andrew sat back enough to suggest he might stay and uncurled his clenched hands. ‘That’s what she told me at first and I believed
her. It seemed obvious enough. Then later, when she…’ He paused. ‘This isn’t easy for me. It’s not a conversation I ever wanted to have with you. Or with her. For a long time the whole… event… wasn’t discussed. I couldn’t bear it; I didn’t think your mother could stand it. Then, when the weight of it became too much for her and she started to talk… there were more layers. She talked about the guard’s death like she had been carrying out a punishment. A “mother’s job” she called it. But that made it sound deliberate, thought out, and I’m not sure it was. All I am sure of is that what she did that day didn’t bring her any peace. If anything, it added to her suffering.’
The scale of that clawed at Karen’s skin. ‘You said you were the one who found her, with the body?’
He nodded.
‘I went to walk her home. One of us, me or Michael, often did, especially at a weekend. I think I was planning to suggest going to the cinema – it was something we both liked to do. She was just standing there, blood everywhere.’ He coughed, swallowed hard. ‘It was me who brought Michael into it. I couldn’t have managed it all on my own.’
Karen had thought fixing more detail onto Andrew’s, and Michael’s, part in the story would make it more real. It didn’t. She still couldn’t grasp the events he had described. Her quiet and gentle mother, who had never raised her hand, clutching a murder weapon. The father she knew, the military policeman who lived his life by discipline, and Michael, the controlled man she had met in Berlin, hiding a murder, dumping a corpse. Two men who lived their lives by strict rules, a woman who she would have said wouldn’t have hurt a fly; all of them acting so out of character. And then Karen remembered the only truth that must have mattered to Andrew and Michael, the agony that Liese had suffered with Lottie’s death, and knew that, as impossible as it all sounded, it also sounded horribly true.
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 29
