Your friend from the old days,
Con
The bombsites were on the other side of the city from Miss Effie’s house, way beyond the wide boulevard with the column, but Oskar never got that far. The men who arrested him seemed to come from nowhere. They gave him a bit of a kicking, and some girls who were working at a hairdresser’s on the other side of the street came out to have a look. He held onto the yellow scarf, though it was smeared with blood and oil and mud. Once he made it clear that he’d no intention of trying to escape, they let him alone. By the time they took him to the Curragh, they were almost benign. They treated his cuts and bruises and gave him thin soup to drink.
Oskar comforted himself with the thought that he had managed to find Miss Alexander and tell her his story. Even if she had not believed him then, he was sure that she would come to do so. Lots of people had witnessed his arrest, after all. There had even been a man with a camera there; he recalled the loud pop and flare of the magnesium. He felt sure that if Elsa was in Ireland, she would be told of Oskar Müller and his efforts to find her. She might even see his photograph herself in one of the newspapers that were sold on every corner. He kept telling the men who’d picked him up that he was not part of the war. He told them he’d jumped. Every day he told them, until he was blue in the face. He hoped they would write about him in their newspapers: the man who jumped out of the sky.
Back in Dublin, at the end of a long rainy summer, Kitty wondered if the whole thing had taken more out of her than she realised. She was exhausted and her stomach churned at the sight of food. Aunt Effie tried a combination of infusions but none of them worked. She sent Ranjit out to HCR for an Alpine tonic but Kitty was no better.
‘You’re expecting,’ Aunt Effie said finally. ‘That’s all’s the matter with you.’
By the next month, the sickness was passing, but the thought of the baby made her panic. She feared what it would make of her life. How she would live. Where she would live. She hoped it would go away. She begged it to go away. But the baby stayed put. One day she felt a little bump at the pit of her stomach. That, she supposed, was it. Aunt Effie advised her against going back to Dunkerin. ‘Haven’t you just come from it?’ she said. ‘Go back now and the fingers will be pointing, the tuts will be tutting. Dunkerin’s the last place you should go. Stay here and in time you’ll make your own way. Haven’t you the typing now?’
It was in the middle of one more sleepless night that Kitty decided to go to the Curragh. The day before she left, she made an apple pie in Aunt Effie’s kitchen. She added a bit of potato to stretch the apple and sprinkled some precious sugar on the top. She felt sick the whole way to Newbridge on the bus. To make sure nobody came and crowded her out, she put the string bag containing the apple pie on the seat next to her. The nearer she got to the camp, the more inclined she became not to see him, just to hand the apple pie in at the gate. She couldn’t rely on herself not to burst into tears.
When the bus approached Newbridge, the girls around her fussed about with powder puffs and lipsticks. Someone offered her some mascara but she didn’t bother with any of that. She was first off the bus and walked briskly up to the camp; she tried to get as far ahead of the others as possible so as not to have to enter into conversation.
The soldier at the gate seemed nice enough. He had a list, and when she told him who she was visiting, he ran his finger right the way down the Ms. Menten. Mollenhauer. No Müller. ‘Sorry pet, he must have gave you a nom de plume.’
The soldier beside him sniggered, ‘A bun in the oven, more like.’
‘Shut up you and mind your manners.’ Then he looked at her and maybe he guessed the other soldier was right. She could tell he felt sorry for her and she couldn’t stand it, the look of pity on his face.
‘That German shower, strutting round Newbridge like a pack of turkey cocks, they’d give you the pip. They’re never done with strutting and marching and all that carry on. As for the girls round here, sure they’ve no sense at all. Some of the young ones we get up at the gate, weeping and wailing. Apple pies and barmbracks and God knows what. “Would you pass this on to Hans, Mister, would you? He’s half starved in there.” Half starved, my arse.’ He checked his list one more time, running his finger down the columns. ‘I’m sorry, pet, there’s definitely no Müller in this lot.’
As she walked back down the road, Kitty flung the pie, bag and all, into the ditch. The girls walking in the opposite direction and chattering away like little sparrows fell silent as she passed. Maybe, they were worried the lads weren’t being let out into Newbridge tonight after all, or maybe they were embarrassed for her. One or two of them called after her but she just ignored them. If she hurried, she might just be in time to catch the same bus back into town.
Ever After
Kitty
Dublin: Summer 1999
Kitty fingers the little pile of memory cards. She’s not one for the creeping-Jesus kind of stuff they usually say; all she asked the printers to put on them was, ‘Goodnight, Con.’ The picture she chose was taken on the beach at Ownahincha the summer before. Con is smiling straight at the camera. He looks like he has a good twenty years in him yet. She’s been dreading the first anniversary; just hopes she’ll have enough strength in her to put a brave face on it for Clara and the boys. Then the phone rings and she rushes into the hall to answer it.
‘Clara! How are you, pet? Of course I’ll be there. What’ll I get in? Chicken nuggets, the usual muck? Ah, you say that, but I’ve never seen them eat anything decent.’
Kitty rummages around in the kitchen cupboard for a tin of Horlicks. She despises the stuff, but all the same she decides it’s probably what she should have in the circumstances: that and a long, bubbly bath. Time was it would have been a large brandy but after the trouble she had in the month or two after Con’s death, she tries to stay clear of that now. She runs the bath, then fluffs up the bubbles with her hand and lies back, the water reaching right up to her collarbone.
She will never forget the day she first saw Con again after the war. He was demobbed sometime in 1946, when Clara was around four. Effie was still alive then, though Ranjit was long gone. The Truthseekers had tailed off and she’d taken to advertising for new recruits in The Irish Times. On first glance, Kitty assumed that’s what Con was when she opened the door to him: someone come to Effie, looking for the Light. He was very failed that first time. His hair was more grey than sandy and he’d grown a little military moustache that perched awkwardly on his upper lip.
Right from the start, Con behaved as though they already had an understanding. She didn’t realise then that war turns men soft in the head. They sat in the kitchen over a pot of tea, and he took her hand in both of his. He told her he recalled something she’d said about keeping to terra firma. He’d been afraid that was a bad omen when his battalion set off for Normandy on D-Day by glider but he’d got away with it all right. Afterwards, he was part of the final push through the Low Countries into Germany.
He came across such awful things in the last weeks of the war that he could never bear anything German afterwards. There was no talking to him. It was not something he was prepared to be rational about. His battalion was first into Bergen Belsen and, although he never spoke of it, she was sure that what he saw there remained always in the tiny fractures in his grey irises, in the thinness of his smile. Con was always searching for proof that innocence could be recaptured, dreams resealed. He couldn’t bear unpleasantness of any kind and, when the end came, Kitty was glad he had a nice clean death. He deserved that.
All through the pregnancy, she’d been raw with the thought that the baby she was carrying was not really hers. After all, the love that made it belonged to Elsa Frankel, not to her. So it was a wonderful gift Con gave her when he lifted Clara that day he came home from the war. ‘How’s my little angel?’ he said, and kissed her on the cheek.
It was as though Clara had been conceived at long distance, as far as Con was concerned. He n
ever asked about the natural father at all. ‘It’s just one of the things that happens in a war,’ he said once, ‘and aren’t we the lucky ones.’
She didn’t look like Oskar but she wasn’t a Hennessy either. Clara had eyes like a cat and loose brown curls. Kitty used to conjure up lost relatives for her from somewhere in the ruins of Berlin; people whose features she had borrowed while they did whatever they had done.
She had much to thank Effie for. Lately, there’d been a lot of hoo-ha about the Magdalene Laundries and how there were girls went into the homes to have their babies and ended up spending forty years scrubbing socks for their sins. Des made sure she was looked after on the medical side. Mother used to say he suffered for Kitty’s shame when he came home to Dunkerin to make his own practice, but Des never complained.
Marrying Con was easy. It didn’t seem wrong, even if it didn’t seem exactly right either. Each was the other’s protector. They bought a little house in a cul-de-sac in Stillorgan and Kitty counted herself lucky enough. Con worked in insurance and she had a job herself until she was able to give it up and concentrate on the amateur dramatics.
Even though she had no picture of him, no letter from him, no clear image of him in her head anymore, she sometimes thought of Oskar long after she’d got over the humiliation of landing up at the Curragh looking for a fellow who’d given her another name. Whoever he was, he wasn’t Oskar Müller. She sometimes wondered what the truth of it all was, whether there was really a girl or not, whether he was really a spy or not. Not that it mattered now, anyway.
Years later, a friend who’d once worked as a clerk in the Department of Justice told her that most of the men in the Curragh didn’t want to go back to Germany when the war ended. Some applied for residency, or whatever it was called, but the authorities wouldn’t let them stay. Once the news came out of the camps, no one wanted a German about the place. The only way they’d let one stay on was if he was marrying an Irish girl. Did it never cross his mind, she wondered, to come looking for her as he claimed to have done for Elsa Frankel? Even just to be allowed stay on?
She was over in Dunkerin the year before last, just before Con’s illness was diagnosed. It was strange to be back in the old house: one of those country house hotels now. She’d had afternoon tea there, in Mother’s drawing room. It was all painted white and smothered with brash canvases with great daubs of paint on them. They’d converted a couple of the outhouses to accommodation and at the time there were a couple of Germans and French staying there for the fishing. She didn’t mention that first German tourist but she thought of him all the same.
The bleakest day of her whole life was the day she went to the Curragh camp to find Oskar. She got the bus straight back to Dublin that same day, didn’t register a single thing about the journey. Just couldn’t wait to get away from the place. She’d had her answer from Oskar Müller or whoever he was. She remembered crying a lot. Aunt Effie had Ranjit up and down the stairs like a yo-yo with peppermint tea and nettle soup and God knows what. It didn’t help that she couldn’t keep anything down. Then one day she just decided to get on with it. She never tried to find him again.
Now that Con was gone, there was no need for secrets anymore. She felt fit as a fiddle. Still, there was no arguing with nature; the end would come sooner rather than later. In the year since Con’s death she’d been plagued with the thought that she should tell Clara the truth. Some Christmas in the unimaginable years ahead when she might be herself again. A few glasses of sherry and out it would come.
Clara had been an unadventurous child. She never asked questions. She did, by and large, what she was told and caused very little trouble for anyone. They’d never told her that she was anything other than Con’s daughter. Now and then, things cropped up that could have opened doubts in the mind of a different sort of child. The time Clara was mad keen on learning German and Kitty cried herself to sleep until she settled on Spanish instead. The time there was the school trip to Berlin and Kitty refused point blank to let her go. Maybe Clara just didn’t want to know; maybe that’s why she’d never asked. Still, Kitty wondered whether it was right to let her grow old without knowing the truth. She had asked herself that many times and each time she had given up the deliberations for want of a satisfactory answer. Instinct told her it was safer to do nothing than to make the wrong decision.
Clara and the children arrive in the middle of a storm of driving rain: sheets of the stuff wash over the windscreen and the wipers are powerless to cope with it. At the airport, Kitty marvels at how nowadays, every time she visits it, they seem to have added another bit on or dug a great pit in the ground or enlarged a car park. Funny, she thinks, how it seems that for years and years everything just stays the same, and then suddenly you blink and it’s all changed entirely.
When Clara appears at the arrivals exit, she struggles to get through the crowds. There seem to be some footballers arriving in on the same flight because there’s a clatter of young fellows dressed in red and white calling for ‘Keano’. Clara looks very tired, she thinks. She’s beginning to seem her age now, after years and years of looking like a schoolgirl. The two boys trail along behind her, looking bored. One of them has an earring. Kitty is glad she hasn’t gone to too much trouble to find those old fishing rods; neither of them looks like the fishing type.
The boys slouch in the back seat. From the moment they arrive, she is uncomfortable with them and a bit self-conscious. In her fuss, she scrapes the door on one of the concrete pillars in the car park. She can hear one of the boys tut-tutting in the back. It makes her mad but she says nothing, and by the time they cross the East Link she has begun to relax.
‘So, what about you, Mummy?’ Clara asks. ‘What were you up to today?’
The only things that matter are deep inside her head. None of them fits the occasion, so she says something about going through the freezer. She even mentions the visit to Superquinn, even though it has always been her policy never to descend to discussing visits to the supermarket. She hears one of the boys move about in the back seat and whisper something to his brother.
They pass the National Museum. A great big tethered flag announces the exhibition: ‘Navigatio: Brendan and the Promised Land’. She opens her mouth to say something about Father and his model curragh, then remembers the boys whispering together and decides against it.
She gets home and makes the boys a supper of chicken nuggets and chips and heats up the casserole she prepared earlier for Clara and herself. The boys look sulkier than ever, until Clara explains, ‘It’s just, Mummy, they don’t really eat that kind of thing any more. They’ll just eat what we eat.’
Kitty feels for the second time that day that she’s failed to match up. She and Clara stay on in the kitchen after the boys have gone into the sitting room to watch television.
‘Did you think about joining something, Mummy? A charity maybe, something like that?’ Clara takes her hand and squeezes it. ‘You could go back to the Dramatic Society, help out behind the scenes. It must be so lonely for you now. I often think how lucky you and Daddy were to find one another, with a war between you. How lucky you were to find love at the end of the line.’
She’s right, of course. Clara has always been such a sensible child, with all the right instincts. Kitty looks at the face that comes from somewhere else and realises that it’s too late for German classes now. It’s much too late for new things. She will let it be.
Oskar
West Cork: Summer 1999
At the airport in Frankfurt, Oskar slips away while Karl and Sophie argue over what kind of perfume to buy Ute, who doesn’t wear the stuff anyway. The electrical shop isn’t hard to find. Oskar has always liked gadgets; he likes them even better now they make them smaller, smoother, steelier.
He lets the Dictaphone sit snug in his palm and tries to remember the last time he used one. Not since retirement, probably. Greta? Gretl? Gisela? One of those nervy girls they employed to plough syntax into his wandering pro
se. The young fellow who sells him the machine is patronising, uninterested. Boredom is no excuse, and Oskar tells him so. Outside the shop, Oskar savours his acquisition. He discards the packaging, and turns the little steel machine over and back in the palm of his hand. Then he rejoins Sophie and Karl, who are waiting anxiously at the departure gate. Sophie is biting the corner of her lower lip just like her mother used to do. Karl is listening to his Tag Heuer, clapping it to his ear.
They give him the window seat. As he looks out over the cloud landscape, he thinks how some things never change. Even now he feels the catch of excitement at his throat. It was a grey day down there in Frankfurt but up here it’s radiant. Sophie and Karl are still talking about the presents they’ve bought Ute. Oskar knows Ute will thank them, then hide the items away or give them to friends. Ute: he’s looking forward to seeing her, spiky little thing. After a while, he’s surprised to feel his mood change; he is melancholy all of a sudden. Then he realises that they’ve commenced the descent. It always had that effect on him, even back in the old days when he was cold and terrified, suspended there in the gondola. He always hated to leave the sky: things were always worse on land.
In the terminal, they stand looking blankly at the black flaps on the surface of the carousel. It starts then stops again. By the time the luggage chugs past them, Oskar is tired. He sits in the back of the rented car as they drive along winding roads flanked on either side by high hedgerows. Ute lives miles from the city, down among the ragged inlets that trail off the end of the map. When at last they arrive, he allows Sophie to help him out of the car. He declines the offer of coffee and lowers himself onto the narrow pine bed. He sleeps without dreams. In the morning, he wakes to wan light and birds. More birds than seem possible.
A Parachute in the Lime Tree Page 18
