by Esther Freud
Wolf marched, lightfooted with the revolution. No tears were falling here for Kaiser Wilhelm, the Empress or their six surviving sons. Lorries packed with soldiers honked and cheered, and sailors, waving flags, stirred up the people with songs.
The young men in the trucks, many of them not old enough for more than a small taste of the war, scanned the crowd for officers, ordering them to pull off their insignia and, if they refused, taking great delight in ripping them away, hurling the badges up into the air as trophies for the children.
Wolf was swept along, down the Linden and into Pariser Platz. The Brandenburger Tor was teeming, small black figures clinging to its surface, and as he stood, craning his neck, a long red flag was hoisted, unfurling from the centre of its arch. The afternoon had turned and in the cold half-dark of dusk the crowd began to swell. The pale women in their shawls were shouting, and men raised their fists and shook them at the palace. The Emperor’s motorcar bleated its way out of the Schloss and a great roar of delight rose up from the crowd. Wolf was pressed back and forth, and forced on to the bosom of a grocer’s girl, still in her overall and smelling of apples. ‘Excuse me. I’m so sorry.’ He struggled to step back a pace, but a truck rolled by, packed full of Russian prisoners, the men reeling with their sudden freedom and each one with a red cockade, like a little patch of blood, over one eye. The grocer’s girl was pushed sideways in the scuffle and Wolf was almost thrown under the wheels of the truck.
Dolfi came in and out all afternoon with news. ‘The royal palace has been broken into,’ she told Marianna, ‘and they are removing all the silver plate.’ Then they heard the trumpeting of horns that, until now, had led them to expect the appearance of the Kaiser’s motorcar. All four women jumped and Dolfi had to stop herself from racing back out into the street.
It was dark and Wolf was still not home. Marianna insisted that they sit down to an early supper and then, as if there was no such thing as a revolution just outside their door, she ordered them to bed. There was a firmness in her manner that made it hard to argue and the three girls retired to the small back room, sitting in a row and listening to the muffled noises of the night, broken up by shouts and the stray hot racket of a bullet.
Marianna was still waiting up for Wolf when a volley of machine-gun fire burst above her head. She had been dozing, picturing her husband in his soft black hat, sailing on the ripples of the crowd, when the force of the explosion shook her to her feet, pounding round the building, rumbling in a well of noise. Dolfi appeared at the door, her face white, her hands over her ears, calling to Marianna to get down, and then Eva rushed in and pulled her mother to the ground. They crouched together in the dark, tightly holding hands. The room had filled with smoke, the fumes from guns seeping in between the bricks. Eva began to crawl towards the window.
‘Eva,’ Marianna called, ‘come back.’ But Eva put her fingers on the sill and eased her body up. She could see small groups of soldiers, clutching their red flags, and an occasional figure as it sped away along the street, running to the safety of a house.
‘Do you see Papa?’ Martha called, shivering with Bina by the door, but as Eva peered out, she was knocked back into the room by a fresh blast that sent a film of powder spiralling from the ceiling. She lay flat, waiting for the noise to stop, straining for the quick breath of the others just across the room. The carpet under her hands was white with dust and the cannonfire rolled on and on. She wondered if it might be possible to sleep like this, to drift away on a great roll of sound, and then, just as she felt unable to bear it any longer, the machine-guns stopped.
‘Dolfi, would you make us all some coffee?’ Marianna rose gracefully from the floor, but Eva, a hollow in her ears, found she could not get up.
‘Manu,’ she wailed, ‘Manu,’ and with a deep sensation that things could never be put right she began to cry so loudly and so hard that she didn’t hear the shouting in the street below and the violent knocking on the door.
Marianna looked down at the body of her husband, lying where the men had left him, stretched out on her bed. He had not been shot, riddled with machine-gun pellets as she’d first feared, but had simply had the life squeezed from him by the pressure of the crowd. His eyes were closed, his glasses lost, and the deep frown jutting in a fork along his brow had loosened, giving him a look of calm. Two revolutionaries, apologetic and polite, had found him in the square, lying limp against a wall. They removed their soldier’s caps in the presence of Frau Belgard, and looked down sadly at their toes. ‘Caught up in the crush, poor old fellow,’ one said, blushing and looking round to check that he hadn’t spoken out of turn. There were footprints stumbling across the thin wool of Wolf’s suit, and his mouth was open, as if to catch a last thin gasp of air. Bina and Martha watched their mother, their hands over their mouths, while with a gracious nod she showed the soldiers out. ‘How can I thank you?’ She pressed their hands, and a tiny tremor passed over the pale set of her face.
The revolution lasted for three more days, but Marianna hardly noticed. She heard the guns below her window only faintly and the sound of fighting rising from the Reichstag. Her old aunt Cornelia arrived, the black umbrella flapping by her side, full of outrage over the armistice. ‘Dear Wolfgang may be better off,’ she lowered her voice, ‘wherever he is now,’ and the corners of her mouth turned down. ‘Another long winter of root vegetables, without fat or salt or sauce.’ She sat down opposite Marianna and loudly blew her nose, telling her how a young woman in her street had turned the gas on herself and her small child rather than face another winter with the blockade still in place. ‘There will be revenge, that’s the worst part of it, there will be some terrible revenge.’
Marianna longed for her to leave. She offered her a cup of coffee, made from carrot, and nodded and sighed as the old woman cheered herself with talk. Aunt Cornelia remembered Marianna as a child, the beauty of her handmade dresses, brown velvet over cream, and the day of her magnificent marriage. ‘Oysters and caviar,’ she sucked her lips, ‘and before the ices, roast goose with new potatoes.’
Marianna gave a small smile.
‘Cucumber salad in February! What a sensation!’ And old Aunt Cornelia raised her eyes to the ceiling.
Marianna and Wolf had been married at the rooms of the Society of Friends along the street at Potsdamer Strasse 9. Almost a hundred people had been invited and many came from out of town. Marianna saw herself, dressed for her wedding and running down to where the local children were gathered in admiration round her bridal coach. She was wreathed and veiled and bursting with excitement, and then, on the seat of the coach, she saw a letter. A stark white envelope addressed to her. She gasped, looking round for anyone who might have left it, a blackmailer, a cast-off mistress, and in her panic she pushed it unopened into her purse. But all through the ceremony the thought of it hummed in her ears. As soon as it was over she rushed away to tear open the letter. ‘It was the congratulations of our house porter,’ she told Aunt Cornelia, and even now the relief of it made her want to cry.
‘It’s all right, my dear girl.’ Aunt Cornelia stroked her head, and Marianna, finally giving in, sobbed on to the damp cloth of her old shoulder.
Marianna woke one morning to the watery sound of talk. She could hear a flow of chatter like a stream, and slowly rising up out of her dreams she recognized the rambling, unanswered tones of Eva. She turned towards the window, guessing that it must be shortly after dawn. A dull, cold light was rising and there was silence in the street. In a sudden panic she sprang up, flung on a coat and hurried out into the hall. ‘Eva?’ The chattering voice had stopped and, doubting herself suddenly, she ran back to check that her daughter’s bed was empty. ‘Eva,’ she called, more sternly now, unsure where to look next, and she moved through the apartment, squinting for her silhouette behind the coloured glass of the front door. Then she heard a splutter of short laughs and from behind the panelling came the unmistakable deep gasp of Eva as she realized that she’d been overheard.
Marianna pulled open the airing-cupboard door and, to her surprise, she saw two faces looking up at her, the startled faces of young children, dark eyes and open guilty mouths. There, sitting beside Eva, his hands twisting in his lap, she found her son.
Emanuel sat surrounded on the sofa. He sank back into the cushions, dazed and shrinking fast under the hard, passionate scrutiny of his family. Dolfi poured out coffee, splashing little drops on to the tray as she looked up at him in disbelief.
‘How did you get here?’ Bina asked.
‘Why didn’t you let us know?’ Marianna leant over her shoulder.
‘Will you eat something?’ Martha urged.
Emanuel tried to puff back into his old smooth self. ‘Where’s Papa?’ He smiled round at them. And Bina and Martha, taking his hands in theirs, stared up at their mother as she stumbled to explain how they had lost him on the last day of the war.
Emanuel retired to his bed. He thought of his gold medal, stolen with his socks, the raised letters of his father’s name in a curve across the back. Belgard and Son, he mouthed into his pillow, and he forced himself away into the long dark tunnel of his sleep.
When he woke he found his sisters hovering. They stayed with him, singing soft songs, pushing at his pillow and tucking his toes under the quilt, until he was forced to consider getting up simply to be rid of them. Marianna had to fight her way into his room, past Bina with her tray of scavenged medicine, bowls of cold water and old linen shredded into strips, over Martha who sat reading to him from ancient myths – dark stories of the underworld and the miracle of Zarathustra’s birth – while Eva perched sideways on his high-backed chair and dripped small words of code into the blotter on his desk.
Marianna resorted to visiting him at night. She pulled her sleeve into her palm to smooth the opening of his door, and trod carefully over the squeaking floor. Emanuel lay, just like in childhood, with one hand curled above his head, and she had to stop herself from lying down beside him as he slept. His eyelids, once an arc of milky blue, were run with purple veins, and she saw the flicker of his thoughts rolling back and forth under the skin. A line was forming in a fork between his brows, knitted even in his sleep, and it made her want to call for Wolf, to glance from one to the other and gloat over the resemblance. As she stooped closer, listening to his breath, her foot caught against a sheet of paper. She bent instinctively to examine it, when Emanuel twisted, threatening to wake. In a sudden panic she scooped the pile of scattered pages up from the floor, and backed with them out of the room.
Emanuel didn’t venture out until after the New Year. He wrapped himself in Wolf’s old overcoat and with one dragging leg, he limped off towards the Tiergarten. Eva followed. She’d volunteered her company, but Emanuel seemed not to have heard and so, at a safe distance, she slipped along behind. Occasionally he stopped and exchanged greetings with some acquaintance passing in the street, and then for a moment the old charm, the curve of his shoulders and his smile turned him back into himself. Eva watched him tilt his head and saw the glitter in his eye, but as soon as he passed on, the smile fell from his face and his shoulders hunched higher and more hopeless than before. Eva dragged her own feet so as not to overtake him and tried to think of new and untried ways to cheer him up.
Since Christmas Bina had been promoted to staff nurse at the hospital. She no longer boiled the implements, washed the patients down, or spoon-fed the most injured, but with firm fingers she pressed gauzes onto wounds and artfully arranged new bandages. Abscesses were drained and old wounds quickly dressed. She answered questions and scribbled notes onto the files of men who, now that the war was over, weren’t necessarily going home.
Martha was studying classics at the university. In her first week she befriended another girl, who was reading Sanskrit in a course all of her own. The two girls, happy to have found each other, wandered in their ancient worlds, arm in arm around the city.
Eva had no plans except the ones she’d made with Emanuel. Dear Manu, she thought, as she followed him along, what are we waiting for? But she was distracted by her brother who had stopped to talk to someone. He had straightened his limp leg and was leaning forward, listening, while the woman, her shoulders covered by a dark brown shawl, appealed to him for something. Eva could see only the dark shape of her coat, patched and splashed with mud and decided she must be one of the many widows who came to him for details of their missing men, poor scraps of news that they’d already heard. Eva watched as, with a sudden tender move, he took both her gloved hands in his. Then she turned and, very slowly, walked back the way she’d come.
Marianna shuffled Emanuel’s pages into order. I am simply trying to help him, she told herself, thinking of the stack of schoolboy poems she had stored for years under her bed, and she noticed that his reminiscences were written on the backs of letters. They were letters from Eva, full of day-dreams and mysterious plans, and it made her unsure which she should read first.
‘My dearest Manu,’ Eva’s words were fine with care. ‘Of course you must rest, let’s not even think about going anywhere until after the winter. I won’t even mention it again, except I had wondered if, on all your travels, you’d seen anywhere that was without doubt more beautiful than Gaglow?’
Marianna turned the pages back and forth, noticing how Emanuel had lost his languid lines, his sloping, boyish curves. The pages, although recognizably in his hand, were cramped and small, running up and catching in one corner. Marianna picked out words here and there, and then, at random, she began to read.
The strong, hot winds that rolled across the steppe made it unbearable to stay outside for long, and after endless pleading and negotiations we finally succeeded in getting permission to go swimming. Fifty prisoners were led along a dusty path towards the river. The sight of the still green water, floating into view after a steep twist in the path, was so exhilarating that even men who couldn’t swim were ready to fling themselves in fully clothed. But dangerous currents swelled under the surface of this river, threatening to drag us down, and even the strongest swimmers were forced to clamber back on to the bank to catch their breath. The water was so deep, sloping steeply from the shore, that we went in packs, calling out warnings to each other and sending men to help the ones in trouble. Despite this, on the third trip, as we were all about to leave, a pile of clothes lay unclaimed on the ground. A German lieutenant had gone missing. Our guards, rather than show sympathy, became greatly excited, convinced that an attempt had been made to escape, and even when after two weeks the corpse of the lieutenant was washed up, so eaten away by worms that it was only possible to identify him by his gold teeth, they still refused to let us ever swim again.
Marianna lay awake wondering about the slow green bend of river, like smooth glass on a beach, and tried to push away the sight of the lieutenant with his ears nibbled into rags. Had his gold teeth been removed and sent back to his mother? She twisted and turned until morning in her bed.
The following night she read a little more.
The unbearably long days, the monotony and claustrophobia, the dreadful disquiet in the rooms, the bad air in the barracks and the long nights, where one hears men coming and going, the snoring, and quite often the fearful shrill cries of a comrade twisting out of a dream, have a slowly disturbing effect. In time all these accumulated things rob one of strength and health and good spirits until the degree of depression becomes so great that some people quite often in irrepressible rage clench their fists and ask themselves whether there is any point in living such a life. Even if the external conditions were any better, each day would still be a new punishment and each month a new torment. It is difficult for a man who has not lived for any length of time amongst prisoners to realize how unhappy he can be when he comes out of the stifling barracks and sees all around him the high and hated fence.
Marianna began to make herself a copy, taking each page as he completed it, so that when she had to slip the story back under his bed she would still have something of he
r own. She sat up late into the night accumulating her own neat pile on thick grey sheets of paper. She copied the story of his capture, his long slow journey east, and the descriptions of hospitals and camps, of doctors and soldiers and guards he’d known over the years. She saw how he had occasionally received the money she’d sent him, using it in tiny plots and plans, and she kissed each page that stood for his survival.
There were about a hundred of us crammed into the hot-room, and although at first the heat was pleasant, soon it forced us out on to the deck where the joy of staring up at a night sky full of stars made up for the cold and the hardness of the ground. We formed a choir, which sang as we travelled down the Volga, sailing through the changing countryside which was sometimes wild with high rocks and then a moment later laid out prettily with fruit trees, cereal fields and woods of birch. The Russians, many of whom were refugees, listened to us peacefully and even I was surprised at how strangely beautiful the German songs sounded so far away from home. The steamer stopped on most days by a bridge, which teemed with traders, where we all took the opportunity to stock up on necessary provisions as the prices on board were high. Unfortunately, after a week, we arrived at the train junction at Samara where thirty of us were packed with six Russian prisoners into a filthy cattle wagon. The further east we travelled, the more run down and disorganized things became: our train actually collided with another, and at one point we even lost a carriage and had to go back to find it. Soon, from the open doors of the train, we saw the Urals rising up around us. At that moment I was convinced we were destined to spend the remainder of the war working in its mines, but we crossed over the Urals and passed from European Russia into Asia, which I actually saw marked in white letters on a border stone. The people here seemed more friendly and the food for sale at the stations was, to our indescribable joy, at least half-price.
