by Esther Freud
‘Did you know,’ Martha whispered, squeezed in opposite her mother in their third-class carriage, ‘that every soldier at the Samson wedding was called back to the front?’
‘That night? Even the husbands?’ Eva asked, and Bina smiled. ‘They’ll have to wait now for their honeymoon.’
‘The telegram arrived just after the service,’ Martha sighed, ‘and by now, for all we know . . .’
‘Martha!’ Marianna frowned, and the three girls looked quickly round the carriage full of soldiers.
Marianna thought what it could mean. Another offensive? The push that would finally break the line? She started to count the men in uniform. How many, she thought, expected even to come home? She wondered that it didn’t break their hearts, the fat Americans all new and ready for the war, to see these worn-out men, half starved, half dressed, staggering towards them through the mud.
It was still raining when they arrived at Gaglow. The lawns were wildly overgrown and, as Marianna paid the driver of the cart, Eva stood between her sisters staring up at the house. The paint was peeling and the tiles of the roof had slipped. The outbuildings in their hollow to one side were crumbling with disuse.
Eva knelt down in the grass and pulled off both her shoes. She spun round, her knees catching on the husks of flowers, and raced away across the lawn, whooping and calling and spreading out her arms. She looked back once to see her mother unbuckling the four remaining dogs, trembling on their whippet legs and the faces of her sisters staring after her. They looked half thunderous and half amused, and she had a sudden memory of Fräulein Schulze glancing disapprovingly around as she held her charges steady in a neat, neat line. The grass was slippery and wet, tangling between her toes with clover, and she held out her tongue to catch the tantalizing drops of rain, fine against her face. She ran right round the lawn, past the fountain and the lichened statue, through the beds of trailing flowers and, finding she was quite alone, she threw herself against the soft slope of the ice-house path and stared up at the sky.
The row of attic windows cut soft grey shapes in the roof and, in a lazy attempt to stare up into the nursery, she remembered her treasure box in its string cradle underneath her bed. It had been sitting there all winter, quite forgotten, and in an act of guilt she reached around her for a pebble or a twig to mark out the important points of her collection. There was her photograph of Schu-Schu, which had a knack of rising to the top. Next there was the coil of wallpaper words, hidden in their thimble, and with a leaf as a reminder she lifted out Emanuel’s oath. The thin veins of the leaf were perfect for his purple blood, and she saw him pressing down with his thumb, sealing the promise of their future. There were the straw stars for the Christmases he’d missed, and the dried head of the first snowdrop. As she was laying out these lesser treasures she thought she heard a whistle. She turned quickly and searched the edges of the lawn, the swaying trees and the little structure of the ice-house. ‘Eva,’ she heard then quite distinctly, and she swivelled round to see Martha standing at the back door, peering out into the rain. ‘Evaaaa,’ Martha called again. Looking down at her scattering of twigs and leaves, Eva jumped up and, throwing out her arms, she ran dripping towards the house.
Eva lay in bed, holding her breath for what had woken her. The moon was still high in the sky but the first light, shadowy and red, was seeping in over the sill. Straining past the shallow noise of her sisters’ combined breath, Eva thought she heard a shuffling. The sound of steps slapping hard over the flags. She slipped out of bed, twisted a shawl around her shoulders and ran down to the first landing. She listened on tiptoe and, hearing nothing, traipsed slowly down into the main hall, taking in the smell of stone and the dust from husks and heads of flowers that lay like soup in a great bowl. The front door clanked as she pulled at it so, not wanting to risk waking the whole house, she trod softly through the drawing rooms and let herself into the stone corridor that led to the back door. Shadows collected here in the arches of the roof and spread through half-open doors into empty, unused rooms. Eva kept her head down, hurrying towards the tiled hall, and with relief pulled open the back door.
The rain had stopped and the garden stretched away, warm and friendly, the lawns waist high with hay and bordered by the waving arms of roses that had overshot themselves. But then, as she turned to shut the door, she heard a noise. A hoarse whistle that could have been the wind. She swung round, freezing with fear, and there, staring out between the pillars of the ice-house, was a man. A dark, bent figure, who backed away as her hands flew to her mouth.
‘Papa?’ she called, but instead of answering, the man sent out another whistle. ‘Manu.’ She ran towards him, her bare feet catching against grass, and as she ran she practised little grunts and smiles of happiness. But when she arrived she found that it was Gruber. He was old and grey and battered to a stoop. His jacket gave off a sour smell, and as she stared at him, appalled, he backed away from her, hovering into the shadow of the ice-house.
‘Can’t you come into the house?’ she asked, once she’d recovered from the shock. They were crouching in the underground chill of the cellar. Gruber shook his head. ‘Is it very dangerous?’ she asked.
‘Only for me,’ and he asked her to keep his secret to herself.
‘I’ll bring you food,’ she promised, and she also thought she’d bring him a gun. He could take it out with him in the dead of night and hunt for roebuck and wild duck, and they could eat together over a fire, stewing up the remains for soup. ‘I won’t tell,’ she said, and Gruber pressed her hand.
When Eva went in to breakfast she felt self-conscious and afraid, and the sight of her mother, straight-backed and pale, fending off the hungry dogs, made her unsure.
Gruber had managed to escape the army. He’d made his way out dressed as a peasant, pretending to be deaf and dumb. Eva, peering at his worn and muddy clothes, wondered if he was still in his disguise. Had he seen Emanuel? she asked, knowing as she spoke that it was hopeless. Gruber put up a trembling hand and asked her kindly to keep her voice low.
‘But I’m sure they wouldn’t send you back to fight,’ Eva said, ‘even if they found you. They couldn’t make you . . . could they?’ She was looking at his fragile face and the thin bones of his shins. But Gruber insisted that less robust men than him were at this moment on their way to France.
Carefully Eva followed her mother through the garden, slipping after her as she went in to inspect the vegetables. They found the old arched door hanging from one hinge, and the garden, abandoned through the spring, quite gone to seed. The spears of leeks were waving at her, nodding the bobbles of their heads, and the bony skeletons of cabbage stood at gnarled intervals in an indistinguishable row. Marianna bent down to clear the leaves from a bed of strawberries, faithfully emerging in a dark green line. She hoped to find at least a few ripe fruit, protected from the birds, but as she scanned each plant she found that every last berry had been plucked away. She searched the trees for fruit, apricots and peaches softening against the wall, but there were only stalks and shreds of unripe flesh pulled away too early. Children, she thought, remembering the melting ice, and she saw Hans Dieter’s lip, curling coldly at her. The only thriving thing was a great striped marrow, lying under a fan of prickly leaves, and it made her feel a little more forgiving of the birds, who must have dropped the seed while eating Eva’s beans. The garden was knee high with weeds, and nettles had taken over one whole corner, disguising what had once been a bed of kale. Marianna found the spade leaning against a wall and, grabbing at it in a sudden fury, she began to beat them away. The handle squelched between her ungloved hands, and as she stamped, tears stung into her eyes.
Eva watched from the doorway, half hidden by the poles for her beans. To her surprise she saw her mother stop and press her head against the handle of her spade, her body shivering in long, sad sobs. Eva froze. She felt incapable of scrambling out unseen and the thought of being caught backing away was unacceptable. She hardly dared breathe. She spun out
songs and half-remembered verses to keep herself still until she saw her mother wipe her face, slice the spade into the ground with new determination and begin to dig again. She shifted with relief and, making more noise than was necessary, she bustled into view. The tangled mass of marrow nearly tripped her up.
‘What are you doing?’ Marianna called to her, and Eva wondered if there wasn’t a way in which she could let her know about Gruber, and how it was he, most likely, who’d been living off the garden. Instead she followed the trail of knotted stems until she came across the marrow, green and yellow where it lay against the earth. A trailing bed of stalks lifted with it until it snapped into her hands. ‘Eva, it isn’t ready,’ Marianna called, striding towards her. ‘It needs at least another week.’ But Eva, cradling her find, ran across the garden and out on to the lawn, wildly hoping that her mother might suspect and follow her.
Marianna turned back to her bed of nettles, dragging the spade over the ground, remembering how different things had been when it was just the two of them.
Eva sat with Gruber on the ice-house steps and watched him as he ate. It was dark but she could see him as he let the marrow juice dribble round his chin. She had also brought him out a little portion of dried beans, boiled up with precious oil, and now she found that she was hungry for them. ‘Tell me some of your adventures,’ she asked, hoping to distract herself, and when he refused to speak she told him how in Berlin it cost over a hundred marks for one pair of leather shoes.
Eva had been unable to find Gruber a gun. She’d let herself into the stone corridor where the marguerites were dying of neglect. They stood, their little flowers shrivelled, grizzling in their pots and Eva plucked at them as she went past. She had glanced into her mother’s study and was surprised to see her there, hunched over the remainder of her thick white book. She stepped a little closer, craning her neck, and saw that she was building toppling towers up and down the page, squares and lines of calculations, and as she worked she crossed off each row of figures with a sharp sweep of her pen. Eva backed away unnoticed and continued on, glancing into the abandoned rooms and hoping to come across some hidden store of weapons. She had an image of a row of rifles hanging from one wall, their thongs attached to nails, like geese against the sky. Eva pushed open the door into another room. The windows here were shuttered, and through the slats of light she could see giant cobwebs meshed and growing in the dark. The walls were rough and empty and only a few discarded pieces of old furniture were heaped, waiting to be used for fuel. In the last room there was a row of pegs, lower than she remembered, and hanging down was an old corn dolly, half chewed away by moths. Eva stood and stared, wondering if she’d dreamt the gun collections, the knives and whips, left by Hans Dieter to remind them of his reign. She remembered Schu-Schu insisting that Dieter was a good man, simply down on his luck, and that it had been their mother who had turned his family out. ‘Where will they sleep now, the poor little Dieter children?’ she heard Bina hissing through the house, and although she had since discovered that there weren’t any Dieter children, not officially, she still shivered with the thought that someone had been turned out of her sunny attic room.
The following evening, Eva went up to bed with the rest of the house and only when she was sure that her sisters were asleep did she venture out again. She arrived with smoked meat and a little portion of dried peas. ‘Gruber,’ she whispered, but when she pushed open the door into the ice-house cellar she found that he was gone. His coat was gone, his small pile of possessions, and even the leaves and straw he’d gathered for a bed were kicked into the ground.
Eva backed out in alarm, convinced that the soldiers had come for him, but as she soothed herself with the unexpected extra food she realized he’d been simply passing through.
Sometimes at night Marianna imagined she heard whispers, light steps out in the dark, and she checked to see that her dogs were in. Even on warm nights they liked to burrow under cloth and she made a quick inspection of their ears and tails, checking the black edges of their smiles. Another of her dogs was sickening. Its blood was slow under the thin skin and a sour smell seeped between its teeth. She’d read last winter in the paper about a family of Schleswig princes who’d been forced to kill their kangaroos for meat. They’d kept them as pets on their estate, breeding them for over twenty years, and now they’d all been eaten. She squeezed herself between the folded legs of several dogs and, lifting one long nose on to her lap, she stared into the little bulge of hooded eye and gave thanks that there was so little meat on them.
Marianna followed every piece of agricultural news. She became an expert on the forecasts, heaving sighs and saying prayers for each dry day, and swapping news with anyone who came up from the village. Relief settled with the harvesting of crops and now the late potatoes had come through safely. But then, towards the end of August, the farmers were caught out by rain and the precious cut corn began to sprout, too wet to be brought in, and Marianna, worried for her husband’s sliding spirits, prepared for an early return to Berlin.
Wolf was smaller than ever, with a glitter in his eye, and so thin that his trousers hung in hollows round his knees. He put an arm around his wife and kissed her warmly on the ear. ‘How are you, my dear? Not changed at all, I see.’ He took one of her rough brown hands in his.
Eva watched him as he described the city, the shortage of food, the absence of all meat and how if the war lasted even for another month there was unlikely to be any livestock left in the entire country, ‘But I shall say no more.’ Lowering his voice he told them that now, after four years of war, Hindenburg had ordered only hopeful conversations to be held.
Marianna wouldn’t let her daughters leave the apartment. She had been to Wertheim’s to look at comforters, with no real hope of buying, and found the shop half empty. ‘Laid up with the grippe,’ a sales assistant told her, promoted in this crisis to the job of manageress. She leant across the counter and whispered, ‘In the last week we’ve lost nearly seventy of our girls.’ Marianna put a hand up to her forehead. It was cool and even. ‘They say it’s much, much worse in the countryside,’ the manageress continued, crossing her arms against her chest. ‘In some villages whole families are dying out within a day. Women,’ she said, ‘who’ve waited patiently for four years for their men are burning up with fever, carted off in furniture vans before their young men even have a chance to ask for leave.’
Marianna shrank away from her, and the woman smiled and shivered and turned to help a customer, using gloved fingers to ensure that his pass allowed him to buy his wife a vest.
On her way home Marianna met the wife of old Herr Baum. She darted across the road and whispered that she was going to the bank to hand over her jewels, ‘Pearls given to me by my dear husband on our wedding day.’ Slipping one arm out of her muff Marianna glimpsed a string of pink, like tiny sausages, wound around her hand. ‘If you need a place to hide when the revolution comes,’ Frau Baum put away her pearls, ‘living right there by the royal palace, come straight round to us.’ And as they parted Marianna thought she caught her staring sharply at her hair. ‘Guten Tag, Frau Baum,’ Marianna waved and watched as the other woman hurried up the steps, pushing open the heavy doors into the bank.
Eva wrote a letter to Emanuel. She used only one side of the paper so that if he needed to he could use up the rest.
Dear Manu,
I won’t say anything at all about the gloomy state of things here in Berlin because it has been ruled that anyone with a bad word to say could end up with five years in prison. Bina has gone back to the hospital and when I visited her there I saw soldiers with arms and legs as thin as sticks. One man told me how he advanced from trench to trench for five days with nothing to eat at all and his friends who weren’t killed just fell down with exhaustion. This man survived by jumping down into an enemy trench, where he found biscuits and a cigarette!
Eva read through this letter and decided she should start again.
Dear Manu,
She sealed this letter and, without any clue as to his real address, stored it tightly with the others in her box.
Chapter 18
‘There’s something still not quite right with the painting.’ My father rang first thing one morning. ‘I think we’ll just have one more go.’ It took me half an hour to find the scrap of Babygro, bundled out of sight into a cupboard. I considered bringing toys to keep Sonny transfixed. I could hold a string of plastic teddy bears above him while he posed, but the idea of the studio, its silence broken by the tinkling of electronic Brahms, decided me against it.
When I arrived someone was ringing the bell. I could see him leaning on his finger, determined, and even from behind I recognized the rounded figure of my father’s cousin John.
‘Hello.’ He straightened guiltily. ‘I’m Sarah . . . I’m Michael’s daughter.’
He was looking at me, his eyes round with surprise. ‘Sarah.’ And he began to nod and smile. ‘How very nice to meet you.’
‘And this is Sonny, my . . . Michael’s grandson.’ John’s smile quivered, as if more than one new relative might be too much to take in in a day.
‘He doesn’t appear to be there.’ John looked up at the house.
‘No,’ I agreed, but thought I caught a shadow stepping out of sight against a wall. ‘Was it important?’
