by Esther Freud
Kate looked startled as I burst into the flat. ‘Are you back already?’ I could see that Sonny hadn’t even woken up. ‘You’ve been gone less than an hour.’
I threw myself into a chair and laughed out my relief.
‘Well, obviously, any time, it was no trouble.’ Kate folded shut her book, and it occurred to me that I should go straight out again while I had the chance.
‘It’s a shame that we couldn’t take him with us,’ she said. But the sign by the lake gate ruled against children, dogs and men. ‘All the annoying things in life,’ Kate laughed, ‘and all the fun ones.’
I took the opportunity to ask her about Patrick. ‘Fine.’ She shrugged and smiled and I knew I wasn’t likely to get more.
‘You know where you could go? If you do still intend to go away?’ She thought for a while before speaking.
‘Where?’
‘Well, you know Dad’s parents used to rent this house in Norfolk.’
‘Yes?’ I wondered how she knew.
‘Well, apparently it’s still there. Someone I know stayed there quite by chance. The family name was in the visitors’ book summer after summer.’
‘Really?’ I imagined him receiving this news, cool and uninspired. Asking how they’d ended up in such a flat and dreary place.
‘Apparently it’s really lovely.’
We sat in silence for a while.
‘D’you think he’d mind?’
‘Why should he?’
And I thought of all the trouble he’d taken to throw his family off.
‘Why do you think . . . ?’ I didn’t know how to say it. ‘Why . . .’
‘I suppose,’ she said, following my thought, ‘he didn’t want to be one of them. Refugees huddling together.’ And we smiled at the big wide gaps he’d made between us.
Chapter 17
‘Oh, Papa.’ He came out into the hallway to welcome them. ‘Oh, Papa.’ They crowded round him. ‘Have you been working much too hard?’
Even Marianna was unable to pretend that he looked well.
‘Such important work,’ he said, ‘buying and selling, storing and rationing. And all for the highest price. No, no letters,’ he was forced to admit, and by mid-afternoon he had sunk into a seat in the drawing room and let his head fall forward into that day’s news.
Eva sat opposite him playing solitaire, glancing up occasionally at the unchanged expression of his eyebrows. She let the marbles drop into their cups, staring hard at the board and attempting to remember the trick for winning that Emanuel had taught her. It was a matter of order and routine. Clearing the game in triangles, jumping over one marble at a time and picking off small sections. It was vital to resist the trap of striking out too fast for the pure pleasure of seeing the defeated marbles swimming round the edge, clinking against each other as they mounted up. But however often Eva played, and in whatever order, there were always four obstinate glass balls glinting up at her, winking and stranded on the board. ‘Papa?’ she asked, picking up the game and holding it above his sheet of paper. ‘Do you remember the trick of this?’ But Wolf raised his eyes to hers with such a wearied expression that, after a second of dazed silence, she carried it carefully back across the room and set it down.
Bina, Martha and Eva sat huffing and sighing over the appropriate way to congratulate the Samsons. Julika had become officially engaged as well as Angelika and it was possible the girls might share a double wedding. Eva felt her shoulders tense as she tried for her next word. ‘Why isn’t Papa at his office?’ she asked, when Dolfi bustled in to tidy up around them. ‘Isn’t he needed there any more?’ But her sisters shrugged as if there was nothing unusual about their father spending the whole day bent over in his chair.
‘You can ask him yourself.’ Bina looked up and there he was, teetering in the doorway. ‘Papa,’ she whispered, and she realized she’d never seen him cross the threshold of their room.
His face was powdery, his eyes focused far away. ‘Papa?’ But instead of answering he tilted forward and, like a boat sinking in the graceful distance, he up-ended and crashed down towards the floor.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ Eva scrambled desperately over furniture to get to him.
Dolfi bustled, a smile forced on her face. ‘Come on now, Herr Belgard,’ she coaxed, and with some help from him she heaved him up. He stood reeling as if even he had been surprised, and with Dolfi’s arm around his waist they shunted off together from the room.
Bina and Martha remained motionless, their heads bent low, and just as Eva was about to turn on them she noticed their fingers both white against their pens. She walked over to the window. Her hands were freezing and she held them up against the panes, waiting there until the sun sank below the level of the street and Dolfi, with a bright new face, came in to switch on the light.
One afternoon Eva met her sister outside the hospital. She had a small bag of dried apple rings and a wilting bunch of leaves. ‘Can I really visit him?’ she asked, when Bina came out in her nurse’s uniform, and Bina looked her over and took her back inside.
Bina had befriended a young soldier, whose leg was shattered at the knee. It refused to heal and almost every day there was a check on it to see it wasn’t turning gangrenous. ‘Don’t mention anything about it,’ Bina warned, as they hurried through the ward, but once they arrived beside his bed, Eva felt her eyes travelling compulsively towards his leg to check that, in the short time Bina had been absent, a decision hadn’t been made to cut it off.
‘Ernst Guttenberger.’ Bina hovered over him. ‘Ernstl, this is my sister.’
Eva noticed that he and Bina looked alike. He had the same round mouth and eyes, short neck and sloping shoulders, and she longed for a chance to examine his feet to check if they’d been bound up in another life, like Bina’s. Instead Eva stood and looked at him in silence, pushing down the flood of amputation stories that sprang into her mind.
‘And your other sister?’ Ernst asked, and looked expectantly around as if Martha were likely to stroll out from behind a screen.
‘My other sister,’ Bina blustered, ‘is too busy studying.’
Eva couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. She looked unhappily at her sister and found her involved in a silent but absorbing communication of minute facial gestures, small frowns and smiles and crinkles of the eyes that passed silently between her and Ernst. Eva sat down on a chair beside the bed and absent-mindedly began to eat the apple rings.
‘Dear Emanuel,’ she wrote out in her mind, ‘I’ve been thinking I’d like to have a pair of fat white ducks and see their yellow bills chattering first thing every morning. We could eat their eggs, and I’m sure they could be trained to get on well with a dog and I know the horses wouldn’t be bothered by them for a moment. Do you know, instead of a car I’ve been wondering if it mightn’t suit you better to get a motorcycle. Then I could climb on to the back and we could cut paths through the woods without worrying about the horses’ shoes.’
Eva looked up to find a pair of vexed expressions staring over at her. ‘Eva,’ Bina patted down her uniform in shock, ‘you’ve eaten Ernstl’s apple rings.’ Eva looked into the crumpled bag and saw that it was true.
A charity had been set up in Berlin especially for governesses who’d fallen on hard times. Over the last year, Bina had managed to convince her sisters that Fräulein Schulze had most definitely been sacked. ‘She may have gone there to seek refuge,’ she insisted, and set out to investigate. But the charity, it transpired, only catered for young women who’d been foolish enough to take work in England before the war, and they had never heard of Gabrielle Schulze. Martha thought it possible she might have put herself into a convent. The others laughed her out of this and together they decided she was more likely to have found a place with some aristocratic family. The wife of a baron or a prince. They looked out for her in photographs of the reported weddings of the Kaiser’s sons, hoping to get a glimpse of her between the heads of officers, screwing up t
heir eyes for maids of honour and trying to identify each grainy smile. Eva watched out for her as she cycled through the city, steering round the endless queues for food, and staring instead through the long windows of the Esplanade Hotel or at the people milling about before the theatre.
She took to wandering through the Tiergarten, listening to the patriotic tunes of the old orchestras and watching men on leave sitting straight-backed under shades, while women used communal fires to brew up jugs of watery green coffee. She no longer saw her father on these walks and once when she thought she caught a glimpse of him, she quickly turned away. She watched him in the mornings, leaving for his office, and nodded to him when he returned at night, but she refused to be the only one to notice his decline and prayed that it would not be her who witnessed its next stage.
The newspapers were full of Russia, men giving up, marching away from battle, and the Cossacks, who were under orders to shoot down any deserters, refusing to fire. ‘It looks as if the war might soon be finished on the Eastern Front.’ Marianna turned to Wolf. ‘Think what this could mean for us. For Manu.’ Wolf did not reply. Marianna stood and watched him. Then, unable to keep the sharpness from her voice, she said, ‘Do you intend going in to work at all today?’
‘Of course.’ Wolf lowered his paper and, like a sleep walker, began to move towards the door.
‘My dear,’ she called after him regretfully, but he didn’t turn, and a few moments later she heard a shuffle and his steps out in the hall.
Marianna opened up the safe to look into the girls’ three boxes. The coins were thinning out now, and she wondered whether any of the money had ever reached Emanuel. His box was dense and heavy with untouched gold, and in a fit of guilt she considered making some small adjustment in favour of her daughters. She moved one coin tentatively over, and then another, and then, as if to redress the balance, she ran to her own room to find her ruby earrings, returning to drop them hastily into the new narrow space in Manu’s box.
Martha was not allowed to visit Ernst. Bina insisted it would be too much for him, the excitement of a stranger, and Eva, who was free to come and go, felt proud and then a little vexed that she was considered so unthreatening. She glanced more often into the hall mirror. She was almost as tall as Martha, with the same straight hair, but the last years of rationing had thinned her face so that her ears stood out and her eyes were shadowed by a permanent sleepy blue. She looked better if she stepped up close but at a distance, in the gloom of the front hall, she had the air of being half invisible.
Ernst had lost his leg above the knee. Bina remained loyal, explaining regularly how much worse things might have been if it wasn’t for her extra special care, and insisting that nothing between them had altered. But Eva could see that Ernst was fading. He no longer responded to her sister’s special signs, her eyebrows raised and the tiny language of her hands, but lay submerged in a world all of his own.
Eva sometimes sat and talked to him about Emanuel. She broke her secret promise and told him about their plans. The house they intended building, once she was sixteen, the garden and the lake, the forest, and how it was simply a matter of finding a forked tree a certain distance from the house, so that she could lie dozing in a hammock and still smell supper just before it burnt. Ernst Guttenberger listened, sometimes with a smile and more often with his eyes fixed on the lopsided hillock of his sheet. He didn’t have the energy or interest to remember what she said, and even when she came to ask him what could have happened to Emanuel, now that the war was finished between Germany and Russia, he still only glanced towards her with a polite smile and asked her to repeat the question.
‘Typhoid, torture, lice, starvation.’ She remembered Bina’s words when Emanuel was first taken prisoner and wondered if news had spread into the far reaches of Siberia that the war was over.
Eva rose early to queue with Dolfi for their food. Prices had been fixed to every allocated portion but it was still possible to find an egg or two or an extra pat of butter. Women shuffled forward in the early morning, tightening their lips against a smile when, after hours of patient waiting, they were rewarded with a little heap of cabbage.
This morning Dolfi shook Eva awake with the rumour of a goose. Around the country supplies were still smuggled regularly, despite the humiliation and the chance of being caught. Eva had once seen a lady forced to open her suitcase on the station steps. She’d glimpsed the snout and hairy ear of a pig before the crowd closed in, demanding that the animal be divided up and sold right there in equal shares to all the starving people.
It was still half light when Dolfi found the street and slipped along a lane between two buildings. There was a busy trade in the small yard and large sums were being handed over for eggs and milk and syrup. A little crippled man lifted, packed and handed goods out of a shed, shouting orders to a woman who moved about behind. Eva stood back while Dolfi fought her way through the people, the housekeeping money secured in the inside pocket of her coat, and listened to the murmur of voices as they insisted, one against each other, on getting what they needed most. From time to time she glanced back towards the street for anyone suspicious and it wasn’t until Dolfi called her to hide a jar of sugarbeet syrup in her clothes that she caught sight of the woman. It was her hands she saw, bare above the wrist, passing the goose out through the shed door, knocking its lolling neck against the wood. ‘Schu-Schu?’ she had to cough to find her voice. A woman pushed in front of her and Dolfi, having wrapped the goose in a scarf, began to bundle her away. ‘Wait.’ She twisted round to catch the woman’s eye, but there were the heavy shoulders and bent head of a stranger and the freckled wrists had disappeared from view.
‘Quick, Evschen, come along,’ Dolfi called and, with the swaddled goose under her coat, they hurried off.
One late afternoon Marianna was walking in the Tiergarten when she saw the Kaiser. He was strolling in a little group of men, his hand clutching at a cane and his head bent as if he wished he were alone. She stopped and bowed, smiling over at him, hoping to make up for her childish impudence so many years before, when she remembered how her feelings for his family had changed.
The people around her stopped and stared and a murmur hissed from mouth to mouth, a savage wonder that the Kaiser dared to show his face. A special store of hatred was brewing up against both Kaiser Wilhelm and the Empress. It was the relentless good health of their sons, all six remaining year after year unhurt, while every other family in the land was mourning. Marianna had heard it said that until they let one go, sacrificed just one of their own children, they had no chance of finding any favour with the people.
Marianna stood back and watched him pass. His burly frame had stooped and there was something fragile in the steps he took. She shivered as she watched him wind along the path, his back bent like an old woman’s, and she couldn’t quite find it in her heart to blame him.
The Samsons’ was the first smart wedding since the beginning of the war. Private balls and parties had been banned, but now, with the general air of cynicism, entertaining had crept back into fashion. Marianna stared at the expensive lines of the invitation and felt a stab of pain as if her son had been thrown off right there in front of her. ‘Wolf?’ she called, running back through the apartment, glancing into rooms. ‘Wolf?’ But he seemed not to be there. She saw Eva wandering sleepily towards her, wrapped up in a blanket. ‘Have you seen your father?’ Eva stopped and placed the flat of her hand against the airing-cupboard door. ‘He’s hardly likely to be in here.’ But despite herself she followed Eva in.
The little room was cool and musty. The rows of boots and hanging gloves gave off a mouldering smell. ‘Papa?’ Eva called, as if he might have camouflaged himself among the coats and scarves. ‘Papa?’ But no one was there.
Marianna had a sudden overwhelming sense of doom. ‘What would he possibly want in here?’ she said, closing her eyes against the locked door of the safe, and Eva, seeing that the room was empty, shook herself and said she didn’
t know.
The Samson wedding was extravagant beyond all expectations. There were ten bridesmaids, all dressed in pink and carrying bouquets of matching flowers. Bina looked on, incensed not to have been included, as each perfect girl swayed by. ‘They’re all members of the family,’ Martha pointed out. ‘Cousins and second cousins.’ But Bina did not want to be placated.
‘And, of course, where is Mama when we need her?’ she scorned, knowing that Marianna had chosen to stay at home in mourning for her dog. The day before, she’d found her favourite whippet stretched out and cold, her dead back legs as brittle as old sticks. Her eyes were open, soft as prunes, and her perfect ribs strained hard against her skin. ‘Bluebird,’ she crooned. She wrapped her up, a corner of the cloth over her ears, and held her in her arms.
Marianna looked out of the carriage window. The rain was falling, slanting lightly past them and scattering away into the earth. She could see the cornfields unfolding with relief, straightening and opening after weeks of cold, dry wind. She closed her eyes and pictured Wolf, almost driven to distraction as each dry day through June had threatened to destroy the harvest. The potatoes came to an abrupt end and, with the blasting wind, the vegetables lay stunted in the ground. He had withered, shrunk, predicting slow starvation for anyone who’d escaped the war, and turned grey and silent in his grief.
But the first warm drops of rain had pulled him up, opening his limp face like a plant and, with a great explosion of renewed faith, he began to spend each day and most of the night in working out just how each ear of corn could be most valuably distributed. ‘Of course you must go,’ he insisted, when she suggested taking the girls straight on to Gaglow, and he set off for his office with an energy she had hardly seen since the beginning of the war.
