A Parachute in the Lime Tree

by Annemarie Neary

  There was utter devastation, of course. Just little huddles of people hiding in the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings. I am so glad now that Joachim didn’t live to see what happened to his beloved Dresden.

  I had no idea where my family was. I did find one or two schoolfriends, girls who had stayed in the family home. Here and there, some houses were still more or less in one piece. Our own place was completely destroyed, the Frankels’ too. It was a long time before there was any system set up to try and find relatives but eventually I did find Vati, sleeping rough. Mutti had been killed in an air raid, he told me. He didn’t know what had happened to Emmi. The last Vati heard, she’d gone off with Reinhard on a family posting to a KZ over in the east. Vati was cagey about what he’d known of what was happening in those camps, about what Emmi must have known. I wanted to believe him, for Emmi’s sake as much as for his own, but I couldn’t. I saw him once or twice only after that. The last time I went to find him at his usual spot, he wasn’t there.

  She ran through my life like a red thread, Ute. Like a red thread. I would love to have seen her one more time. Even just once. From a distance, maybe. From the balcony in a concert hall. Through a telescope. Then closer, maybe. But not so close that she could spot me. Not until I’d decided how close I could allow her to get. All my life I’ve been looking for her. Running away from her pale copies, choosing the women who least resemble her. And now you find her in an evening.

  It’s the day of their departure and Oskar takes his final walk here. Most days, his knees give him trouble but his back is still good. Stiffly, he walks, in his green jacket, the same walk each day since he first arrived. He closes the front door quickly to keep out the wind, then walks fifteen paces to the base of the hill. A sherbet-green field angles sharply to the left, like it’s propped up against the sky. Plump black and white cows clutch at its surface. To the right, long grass slopes to the sea. All around, the hedgerows are rippling with flowers. He doesn’t know many of their names but one flower is everywhere. It is red with purple droplets and it spots the hedgerows like some spectacular affliction. He’s been told that it’s the fuchsia.

  Oskar walks close enough to the edge of the cliff to see the spray tease the rocks below. The voice in his head – Sophie’s – tells him to stop that now. After that, the walk loses its charm and he turns around on the pivot of his stick and heads back towards the cottage, where they will all be waiting. Sophie will flap. Karl will examine his Tag Heuer. Ute, though, will understand. She understands everything now.

  Outside the rented cottage, he sees the car that Ute uses; the Irishman’s little car with the battered red number plate. Ute has been to the city. She has brought something for Oskar to take back to Germany with him. It’s a record, an old recording, American. She says it never came out on CD.

  ‘It’s not that she became famous or anything,’ she says. ‘It’s a minor label, I think. It would probably never have reached Ireland only it’s Field’s Nocturnes. When you boil it down there aren’t that many recordings. Look, Elsa Frankel plays Field. 1960. New York.’ She hands him the sleeve. He can tell she’s proud of herself and he tries to smile but all he can think of is how many years he has lost. He looks for a photograph but there isn’t one, just a potted life story that breaks his heart.

  Elsa Frankel was born in Berlin. An only child, her parents perished in the Nazi holocaust. Elsa herself escaped to Belfast thanks to the Kindertransports. She lived briefly in Dublin after the war before emigrating to the United States with her Irish husband, Dr Charles Carolan Byrne.

  Ute’s poet has a record player and she has brought that with her, too. She watches Oskar while she puts it on. He doesn’t recognise the music; at least he doesn’t think he does. It sounds like Chopin, and he closes his eyes. The music drenches his prune of a heart until the loss of her seems too much to bear. Her face is a crisp snapshot in his head and then it fades again. Can an old man cry for the young man he once was? Ute’s voice is in his ear, her arm around his shoulder.

  ‘You see, it was for her. You tried.’

  Sophie is there now, too; a look of horror when she sees his face like that. She offers pills for pain, pills for the heart. Karl is checking his Tag Heuer. They will miss the flight, he says, if they don’t get going.

  It is Ute who puts her foot down. She shoos her parents out of the room and shuts the door behind them. Then, she sits down next to Oskar and takes his hand. ‘You can’t just give up now.’

  Her face is full of hope and energy and he wishes, how he wishes, he was her age again. What a waste it’s all been.

  ‘Let them get their flight. You stay here. I’m sure we can find much more. Her address, maybe even her phone number.’

  She leaves the room, and on the other side of the door, the voices grow louder. Karl is saying they can’t hang around indefinitely. ‘This is just so typical,’ he says. But Oskar’s head is full of Elsa. Sophie comes in, wearing her mac, with her handbag on her shoulder. She has her hands stretched out as if to catch the rain; another of those gestures that belonged to her mother.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asks.

  He pats the seat beside him. ‘Come, Sophie. Sit here next to me.’

  ‘We have got to go,’ she is saying. ‘Now, Vati. Right now.’

  He shakes his head, and she looks at him askance. ‘Are you ill? Is something the matter?’

  ‘I have unfinished business.’

  ‘Not here, Vati, surely. In Ireland?’

  Ute has come back in the room. She has his suitcase, which she wheels over into a corner.

  ‘What is this business Vati is talking about?’

  Ute waits for Oskar to say something but all he says is that he needs a little more time in Ireland. ‘After all, there’s no reason for me to go back to Germany. Who’s waiting for me there? You don’t mind, Sophie.’

  It’s a statement, not a question, and she doesn’t argue.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I suppose not. But you know how you like to have your things around you, everything just so. You’ve seen what Ute is like: chaos.’

  He smiles and so does she. ‘I’ll be fine. Ute will find me another flight, when the time is right. With that computer of hers, she can move mountains.’

  He knows he is getting ahead of himself but he is already imagining a cross-Atlantic flight, something he has only done once, at Rosa’s insistence, to visit friends who lived in a terrible place in Florida with high walls and a swimming pool so blue it hurt his eyes.

  Sophie knows when she’s beaten. ‘Well if you’re sure,’ she says. ‘But remember to give me some notice so I can pick you up at Frankfurt.’

  He can tell she thinks he’ll be home in a day or two. He doubts that.

  When they’ve gone, Ute locks up the rented house and leaves the key under a large stone by the gate. Back at her own cottage, she makes him a salad with some of that goat’s cheese she likes. She puts on a lamp next to his chair and lights a little stack of peat in the grate. Her poet is with friends in the village and she says she will go and join him and they will find somewhere to connect to the internet. He wants to go with her but she shakes her head.

  ‘Best stay here,’ she says. ‘You can start composing your letter. Who knows, maybe I’ll have an address for you when I get back. Oh, and there’s no point talking into that thing,’ she points to the Dictaphone. ‘How’s she going to listen to those? You can use my tape recorder instead.’

  When she has gone, he starts to speak to the new machine. He imagines he is talking to Elsa, though of course he is not sure who she is any more. She may be horrified by him. She may even have forgotten him. He knows, too, that it is possible he has left it too late. But he doesn’t try to second-guess any of that. He just imagines the girl he knew and tells her the story as though it’s something that happened to two other people, a long time ago. He talks and talks, and has filled both the tapes Ute gave him before he realises that he no longer has any doubts. There
are no ifs and buts. He is face to face with the optimism of youth. He jumped for Elsa. Just for her. The realisation is an enormous relief. He pours himself a large whiskey and sits and looks into the fire. The briquettes have crumbled to powder, but here and there, hot nuggets remain. He throws on some more peat but it doesn’t take, so he starts from scratch, with kindling and a pyramid of fuel, until the fire is brought back again.

  When Ute returns, she joins him by the fire. The poet is there too, but he doesn’t linger, just wishes them good night from the door. ‘We went to the pub,’ she says, ‘had a word with the local GP.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Doctor. Elsa’s husband was a Dr Byrne. The GP says there are places he can check. Professional bodies, things like that. If the husband’s been on a register somewhere, chances are they’ll still have an address of some sort. If we find him, we find Elsa.’

  Oskar is not worried to hear there is a husband; he has never paid much attention to husbands. He already knows what he will say to Elsa.

  Elsa

  New York City: Summer 1999

  Sebastian has his own way of sitting at the piano. Not on the stool, exactly, but propped up against it, his body braced for take-off. It’s their last run-through before the Pre-College audition, and Elsa has already decided to say nothing, just to let him play. In the distance, she can hear Carmela emptying the dishwasher, clashing handfuls of cutlery into the drawer, then sliding it shut. She closes the door to block out the noise, pulls her chair over to the window that overlooks the park, and sits there with her notebook on her lap.

  ‘Play it all,’ she tells him. ‘The Bach first, then right through to the Khachaturian. Whatever happens, just keep on going till you reach the end.’

  Even sitting with her back to him, she can sense his nerves; the deep breath she’s taught him to take is gulped down. The prelude and fugue start well: bright, light but steely too. She grips the arms of the chair as he approaches the passage that always seems to trip him up. Today, though, he eases over it. She smiles out at the park. He’s almost ready, she thinks. And just in time, too.

  Sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s Maya’s son. Charlie and Elsa tried Maya on piano, violin, even flute, but she’d never shown the slightest interest. It was always the dance with Maya. But then Sebastian came along and, out of the blue, they had a pianist. What was he? Two, two and a half, the day she first sat him down next to her at the piano? After he’d clashed down through the octaves with the palms of his hands, like all kids do, he stopped and listened to her picking out a melody. Very soon, he could play it back to her. It was their little game. Often he would play a single note and follow it lower and lower until the tone had completely disappeared and the side of his head was resting on the keys. And now, just fourteen, he plays baroque music with more fluency and verve than she’s ever done herself. When he finishes the Bach, she has to stop herself from applauding, because, after all, no one will applaud at Juilliard. Besides, though she is quite sure it was wonderful, a grandmother can never be entirely bias-free.

  He doesn’t start the next piece right away, as though her silence has intimidated him. She glances over her shoulder to check that he’s okay. He shuffles against the stool, fiddles with the handles. He rolls his shoulders like a boxer, cricks his neck. At last, he settles into perfect stillness. His slender back flexes as he takes on the sonata she chose for him. She went for Mozart, the C Minor, though Beethoven is always the favourite. Most kids will attempt one of the warhorses and be trampled by it. But the Mozart is so difficult to get right. Several times she’s heard it played so sweet and heavy that all she could think of were those horrible Mozartkugeln a pupil gave her once at Christmas. Played badly, it was marzipan for the soul. Not Sebastian; he played with it with love and urgency and a kind of desolation. Sometimes she found it hard to believe that he was only fourteen. It was a mystery to her how someone who had hardly lived at all could play like that. Sebastian had never suffered anything worse than a bout of flu, or a girl he liked sitting next to someone else in math, and yet he seemed to understand so much.

  He is just starting the second movement when Carmela opens the door and tiptoes in with the morning mail. She shakes her head, mimicking disbelief at the standard of the playing, then lays a little pile of letters on the table next to Elsa before tiptoeing out again. She recognises Maya’s handwriting on a pink envelope, James’s on a white one. Of course, it’s Mother’s Day this weekend. They will have a family lunch in the Italian place Maya likes but James can’t stand. Siblings. The rest are brown envelopes: bills or requests from charities. She resumes her concentration on the sonata and makes herself a little note. Adagio: starts too fast. Need much more contrast with 1st mov.

  The door creaks open again and she feels a little stab of impatience with Carmela, who mouths, ‘Sorry,’ and places something else on top of the pile of letters.

  This one looks more interesting; it’s a little white mailer with a great splattering of stamps on its top right corner. Elsa rarely receives packages unless it’s a birthday or some other celebration. Mother’s Day again? She doesn’t think so. The package is a little smaller than a paperback. The stamps are ones she hasn’t seen before: bright blue skies, a biplane, a helicopter. Éire, they say. She looks on the back for a sender but there isn’t one.

  She hasn’t been back to Ireland in twenty years, since Charlie died. That final visit most of the time was spent in the countryside, at his sister’s house in Adare, but they’d stayed a week in Dublin too. They made a nostalgia trip to Stamer Street but there was no sign of any Abrahamsons any more. Someone said they thought the last of the family had left for Israel some years back. Portobello had changed completely. Only one Jewish bakery remained, and though they were there over Purim, there weren’t even any hamantaschen on sale.

  ‘No demand,’ said the baker. ‘It’s really just bagels and pretzels these days.’

  She’d been glad to get away, relieved she’d never made the trip back to Berlin.

  Elsa turns the package over in her hands. The handwriting looks young, rounded, probably female. Most of Charlie’s relations left Ireland long ago, in the course of one recession or another. Nowadays, they were scattered: England, Holland, even Australia. There is something odd about the package. She can’t think what it is but she’s sure it will come to her when Sebastian has finished. Right now, though, she needs to concentrate. She’s missed most of the second movement and now he’s already well into the third. He plays it beautifully, and when he dashes off the final two chords, she gets to her feet. ‘Bravo!’ she says. ‘Bravo!’ The sound of her voice makes him jump, and she realises then just how tense he is.

  He smiles, a little wearily, when she touches him on the shoulder. She hopes she hasn’t been pushing him too hard.

  ‘Bubbe,’ he says. ‘Can I get a glass of water?

  ‘Take a break if you like, darling,’ she says. ‘Have a walk around, stretch your legs. We never really decided which one you’re playing next, did we? The Chopin or the Field?’ He shrugs, and next thing he’s out the door and she can hear Carmela offering him a milkshake.

  It’s only as she’s tearing open the package that she realises what’s strange about it. They’ve used her maiden name. Miss Elsa Frankel. She draws her cashmere shawl closer around her. She changed her name to Byrne back in ’48, as soon as she was married. By that time, Charlie had contacted the bureau and they’d tracked down her parents’ names on a deportation list to Theresienstadt. The new name had been a comfort, a wing to shelter under. It was years before she felt strong enough to be Elsa Frankel again. It was a way of honouring Mama and Papa, to use the name professionally for the performances she gave now and then in the outer boroughs. Then, when the career ended, she put the name away.

  The kids were Frankel-Byrnes: their choice, not hers. In her late teens, Maya had stood at the door of the kitchen, her hands on her hips, and announced that she wanted to go to synagogue. ‘You can’
t stop me from being what I am.’

  Charlie wasn’t keen on any religion but he said nothing. As for Elsa herself, though she found it too painful to be Jewish in New York, let alone admit she was from Berlin and ally herself with the wounded and the lost, she was glad, too, that the thread had not been broken. If Maya was willing to take it on, well and good. For Elsa, it was just too hard.

  She looks at the name. Elsa Frankel. She traces the curved lines of the handwriting with her fingertip. She can’t imagine why she should suddenly be Elsa Frankel again. Not now, at nearly seventy-eight.

  The letter is in German. She reads the opening line and at once she knows who this is. The day slips away from her, and the place, and she is back in Berlin with Oskar, as though the entire life she has lived as Elsa Byrne suddenly belongs to someone else. When she looks up, Carmela is standing over her. She is saying something about a sandwich. She recites a list of ingredients: pastrami, cheese, tuna. She talks of a little salad, maybe, if Mrs Byrne would like. But the voice in the letter is more urgent than anything Carmela has to say. Meanwhile, Sebastian has started to play the Field. It is the wrong moment for Field, and she tells him to stop. Something in her voice must have startled him. He gets up from the piano and moves towards her. ‘You okay, Bubbe?’ he said. ‘You sure?’

  She tries to keep her voice steady. ‘Try the Chopin instead,’ she says. ‘The B flat minor. Play that.’

  My dearest Elsa, the letter begins, I have always loved you.

  While she could read the letter well enough without them, she pulls up her glasses from the chain around her neck and puts them on to hold back her tears. She reads it through, and then again, and each time more and more of it returns to her. The woods? She remembers the woods, the lake, all of it. She’d been no more than Sebastian’s age when she and Oskar fell in love. She would practise for hours at the open window of the house in Zweibruckenstrasse, the music wafting over all the neighbourhood gardens that stretched right down to the tall screen of chestnut trees. How she’d loved that garden: the pale pink roses on the wall that divided them from the Müllers, the old swing, the summerhouse where Papa would drive Mama crazy with his paint spatters all over the floor. Mama and Papa. She couldn’t bear to think of them. Theresienstadt, and then what? Charlie had spent years trying to find out what had happened to everyone but in the end she’d asked not to hear any more.