by Rosie Thomas
This is what it is like, she told herself. She had seen the same satisfaction in Jake and Ruth at the beginning of their marriage, and in Grace and Anthony not long before Anthony’s death, and she had imagined that she would always be a hungry spectator at the feast. But now, in her happiness, she felt that she was sitting at the head of the banquet table.
Clio yawned and stretched her body like a cat, covertly admiring the litheness of it. She began to look in the spotted mirror of her wardrobe as she dressed and undressed, narrowing her eyes and turning to look at the curves of her own waist and hips.
In all her hours of talk with Rafael she rarely mentioned Miles, but she did tell him about Captain Dennis and how she had imagined that she was in love with him. He laughed at the story.
‘How could any man have confused your cousin Grace with you?’ he wondered, lazily spanning her belly with his hand.
Clio felt a spasm of pure delight. She leant over to kiss him, tangling her fingers in his hair to hold him where she wanted him.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘It was a terrible mistake.’
On warm Sunday afternoons they took to travelling by tram from Potsdamer Platz out to the Grünewald. They walked for hours through the pine trees that fringed the lakes, watching the pleasure steamers and the families picnicking beside the water. Once they took the Stadtbahn to Potsdam, and admired the formal gardens of Frederick the Great’s palace. Clio poked mild fun at the architectural excesses of the vast Neues Palais and Rafael pretended to be patriotically offended.
And then, when the full heat of summer arrived, they would travel to the Wannsee to sit on a ribbon of beach with the weekend crowds of Berlin boys – who looked so harmless out of their uniforms and in their woollen bathing shorts – and their pouting girls, and the old grandmothers with rolled-down stockings showing their mottled legs, and the eddies of shrill little children. Clio was enchanted by the double beach chairs with their huge wicker hoods, and always insisted that they hire one in which to create their own private kingdom within the wide, benevolent territory of the Sunday beach.
The shade under the chair’s hood made her think of the canvas pavilion that Blanche’s chauffeur used to erect to protect her ladyship and her sister from the mild Norfolk sun, and of the red pennant fluttering over it, and then of the rowing boat, the Mabel, sawing through the North Sea swell.
In August it grew very hot. The sky turned the colour of an ugly bruise, and seemed to hang too low over the sweltering city. The small rented rooms and apartments were stuffy and collected the smells of mice, of food cooked in stale fat and the puddles of urine left in the doorways of Jewish shops. As she dragged herself to and fro Clio found that she almost longed for the bone-chilling brown cold of a Berlin winter.
Rafael was tired and low-spirited. As a Jew he was now debarred from practising the law in any public capacity, but he still worked long hours preparing cases for those of his clients who could persuade a German lawyer to act for them. He was always available to anyone who wished to consult him, and he worked endlessly on appeals against the Nazi appropriation of Jewish property and goods.
For two weeks Clio saw almost nothing of him, and then one evening he came to visit her in her room. He lay on her bed with his shirt unbuttoned in the heat, too listless even to eat the food she had prepared for him. She saw that there were grey circles under his eyes, and that the skin of his cheeks was unhealthily dry and flaky.
She sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. ‘You need a holiday,’ she said. ‘Can’t we go on holiday?’
Rafael frowned. He began to list the reasons why he couldn’t leave Berlin, but then he looked up into her face and stopped himself.
He lifted his hand to touch the corner of her mouth, and rubbed a fingertip to smooth the anxious line that ran beside it. He was trying to memorize the planes and angles of her features, and the exact pull of elastic muscles under the smooth skin that composed her expression now, in this moment. He wanted to be able to recall her face when they were separated, when he could no longer look at her and touch her.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Clio asked, her voice sharp with sudden anxiety.
Rafael found a way to smile, to reassure her. ‘Nothing is wrong. Of course we can go away for a few days, if you would like that.’ When he thought about it he knew that it was exactly what they must do, while they were still able. He seized on the idea now, polishing it in his mind so that it shone back at him.
‘Would you like to come home with me? To Waltersroda?’
‘Yes,’ Clio whispered.
Rafael’s village was in a clearing in the Thuringian Forest. They reached it in the early evening, after a long train journey from Berlin and a bus ride through small country roads. They climbed down in the village square and watched the bus rumble away from them in a cloud of whitish dust. When it had disappeared Clio took a deep breath of air. It tasted pure and cool, and as sweet as milk after the sour heat of the city.
The little houses around the square were built of rough stone blocks and great beams of wood. They had small windows and shutters with decorative shapes cut in the centre, a different one for each house. A cluster of children played in one corner, under the eye of a brown-faced grandmother who sat on a bench with her sewing. Clio gazed around in pleasure. She realized how accustomed she had become to the massive, florid architecture of Berlin.
‘It’s like a picture in a story-book,’ she said.
There was a familiar banner draped from the gable of one of the houses. It read ‘Hitler – Arbeit und Brot.’ Work and Bread.
Rafael lifted their bag on to his shoulder, carrying it like a peasant moving a bundle of wood. ‘My father’s house is this way,’ he said quietly.
They took the road out of the square, down a little street lined with more of the picturesque houses. They passed groups of children, girls with blonde pigtails and coloured ribbons and boys in shorts and neat checked shirts, and rosy-cheeked young women wearing aprons over their print dresses. There were men coming home from the woods and fields, with knapsacks on their backs and shirtsleeves rolled up to show brawny arms.
They were fair-haired, healthy-looking people, exemplars of the Nazis’ Aryan ideal.
Clio began to see Rafael in this clear rural light. He was as tall and strong and blond as any of these villagers, and she had seen at the very beginning, in the Café Josef, that he and Grete had a glow of health that made them look different from the Berliners.
She understood that he belonged here in the forest clearing, amongst the people with whom he had grown up – and yet he did not.
Some of the people who passed them greeted him. They shook hands, and smiled at Clio, and one or two of them clapped Rafael on the back, and claimed that he had deserted Waltersroda for the big city.
‘Heil Hitler,’ they all called out as they went on their way again, and Rafael nodded courteously in return.
The last house in the village street was a cottage, with red geraniums in the window boxes. A woman came out into the garden at the side and began to throw grain to a flock of Buff Orpingtons.
‘That used to be my friend Peter’s house,’ Rafael said. ‘He is a Wehrmacht officer now.’
The street became a little road, curving between high banks towards the edge of the forest. The fringe of trees looked dark and solid in the fading light. The roadsides were milky with Queen Anne’s lace and the white tufts of old man’s beard. After a little way Rafael pointed. ‘There,’ he said.
Clio saw a square house standing back from the road behind a tidy garden. The forest margin lay just beyond. There was one light showing, in a downstairs window. It seemed a lonely place.
The front door opened before they could reach it. Herr Wolf must have been watching for his son. He held out his arms as they came up the path.
‘Welcome home, son,’ he said. ‘Welcome, miss.’
The room was lit by paraffin lamps with sparkling glass mantles. Clio sa
t back in her chair to look around, now that the greetings were over.
It seemed a more prosperous home than the glimpses she had caught of the village houses. There was a mahogany sideboard with a polished silver urn standing on it, and a series of photographs in carved frames that she longed to look at more closely. Against the far wall was an upright piano, with sheet music arranged in a painted wooden box beside it. There was a woollen cloth embroidered with flowers decorating the simple wooden mantel, and a painted bookcase housing matching editions of what looked like German classics. A long-case clock with a brass pendulum ticked sonorously in the corner.
Everything was neat, and well dusted, but the room felt faded, as if the furniture and the knick-knacks had all been set in their places long ago and no one had had the heart or the interest to rearrange them. Leopold Wolf sat beside the tiled stove in a chair with frayed cushions. Evidently he sat in the same place every evening; the seat seemed to hold the imprint of his body. Clio and Rafael perched opposite him on a wooden-backed bench.
‘And so you are English, from Oxford?’ Herr Wolf asked Clio.
‘Yes. My father teaches linguistics at the University.’
‘You must inherit from him your skill in languages. Your German is truly excellent.’
Rafael’s father had an old-fashioned, rather courtly manner. He spoke very quietly, as if it cost him an effort to utter even a simple sentence.
‘Thank you. Rafael has been helping me.’
The old man nodded. He had white hair, sparse enough on the top of his head to reveal the papery scalp beneath, and a grey-white beard trimmed to a point. He was smaller than his son and much more slightly built, and his shoulders were stooped. While Rafael talked and Clio contributed what she could he leant forward, listening greedily but with an air of faint bewilderment that puzzled Clio. She kept looking around, trying to imagine Rafael and Grete as boisterous children playing in this desiccated room.
It was a little time before the explanation came to her. She realized that Herr Wolf was simply unused to hearing so much talk. The house was shrouded and muffled with his loneliness. It was the old man’s solitude that had bled the life out of the house, like summer’s drought sucking the sap out of a felled tree.
The contrast between this house nudged against the forest wall and the memory of the Woodstock Road seemed unbearably sad. Clio suffered a pang of pity and of homesickness together that brought tears to the corners of her eyes. She blinked and stared at the dim colours of the rag rug in front of the stove.
They had been talking for an hour, or Rafael had talked while his father listened, when the old man looked at the clock.
‘See the time,’ he said. ‘I must go and look to the Abendbrot. You will be hungry, both of you.’
Rafael stood up too, stretching half a head taller than his father. He put his arm around him. ‘How is it here?’ he asked suddenly, as if their change of position had freed him to ask the question that he had avoided before.
Herr Wolf lifted one hand, then let it fall again. ‘Still, sprich durch die Blume,’ he answered.
Hush, speak through a flower.
Clio had heard the expression before. It meant, Say nothing about the Government, or the members of the party, unless you can praise them.
‘Suitable flowers are not so easy to find, these days,’ he added. ‘It is easier to say nothing at all. It is not so bad. Mostly they leave me alone.’
The weight of his loneliness seemed to stifle even the monotonous ticking of the clock.
‘And in Berlin?’
Rafael said, ‘The same.’
Clio knew that in Berlin it was not the same because Jews were not left alone, but she kept her eyes on the framed photographs on the sideboard and did not speak.
Rafael’s father sighed. ‘Some food, then,’ he said.
In the kitchen there were plates and cutlery laid on the scrubbed table, and a small bunch of garden flowers beside two of the place settings, but even these welcoming preparations could not dispel the impression that this room, and the other, and all the house had been frozen years and years ago and that nothing would happen now to thaw the ice and set warm life in motion again.
They sat down at the table and ate thick soup and cold ham and pickled cabbage, and salty local cheese.
‘This is good,’ Clio said, and Herr Wolf smiled at her. She saw Rafael in him, then.
‘My wife was a fine cook,’ he told her. ‘Known beyond Waltersroda, in the old days. I learnt from her, but I have only one hundredth of her skill.’
Rafael laughed. ‘As much as a hundredth?’ Then the glow from the yellow lamps seemed to catch their faces and they were all smiling at one another, and Herr Wolf lifted his glass.
‘To happier times,’ he said.
They drank, but Clio knew that they were celebrating times that had gone, without the hope that they could ever come again.
Rafael put his glass down. He reached across the table and rested his hand on his father’s arm. ‘Won’t you come to Berlin?’ he asked gently. ‘To stay with Grete or me, not to live if you don’t want that, but to let us look after you for a while?’
Clio felt that it was a question that had been put often enough before.
‘I need looking after? Miss here says that my food is good. What could you do better in Berlin?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Leopold Wolf inclined his head. ‘I know what you mean. I can’t leave here. Not now, to go to a city I am too old to understand. This is where I belong.’
The forest stretched behind its dark margin only a few yards beyond the house wall, and in this clearing in the trees lived the healthy, fair-haired country people who were Herr Wolf’s neighbours, with their banners and their cheerful Heil Hitlers. This place with its mild, sweet air was a long way from the huge brown city of uniforms and swastika flags, but it wore the same German face. Rafael’s father was alone here; she did not know whether he was any safer than he would be in Berlin.
Clio wanted to press herself closer to Rafael, to hold him and never to let him go. The strength of the impulse alarmed her, and to subdue it she stood up and began quietly to gather up the dirty plates.
When they were washed and dried and stacked in their places on the wooden shelf, Rafael’s father lit his pipe and sat down at the table to smoke it. Clio left the two men alone, and slipped back into the other room. She stood at the sideboard and looked down at the framed photographs. There was one of Grete and Rafael as children, sitting on a felled tree trunk in a woodland clearing, and another of a woman with a calm, pale face. She looked like Grete, with the same high forehead and a crown of hair piled on top of her head.
In the centre, in pride of place, was a sepia-tinted print of a straight-backed young couple. The girl was wearing a full-skirted dress and a laced bodice, and there were wreaths of flowers in her hands and in her long hair. The man wore an embroidered shirt, and held a broad-brimmed hat with flowers tucked into the band. It was the Wolfs’ wedding picture. Clio turned away and began to study the titles of the books ranged on their shelf instead. She was sitting on the cushioned bench, reading, when Rafael and his father came to find her.
At bedtime, carrying her candle for her, Herr Wolf himself escorted Clio up the stairs to her bedroom door. He opened it courteously, and put the candlestick down on the night table.
‘I am glad that Rafael brought you here,’ he said. ‘I see few people nowadays. I hope you will sleep comfortably, Miss Hirsh.’
‘I shall, in this quiet place.’
The room had been Grete’s. There was a wooden-framed bed, painted with flowers that had been almost rubbed away, and covered with a patchwork quilt. The sheets were linen, fragrant-smelling but worn thin with many years of use.
Clio lay down and listened to the sounds of the house. Beyond these bare walls Rafael was lying too, in his boyhood bedroom. As she drifted into sleep she thought of him, wrapped in the familiarity of the house as if in a q
uilt made of a patchwork of memories.
That night Clio dreamed of flowers and trees, and columns of marching men.
They stayed in Waltersroda for three days. They walked in the forest, following ancient footpaths through the huge groves of oak and beech, where the smallest rustle of a bird in the undergrowth was amplified in the cathedral silence and the thick felt of dead leaves muffled the sound of their footsteps. Rafael knew every path, and the glass-clear streams where they refilled their leather water bottle, and the names of the birds and the unambitious creeping plants of the forest floor.
They saw no one, except in the distance the foresters in their grey-green clothes.
Clio loved the great smooth grey pillars of the trees and the canopy of shifting green knitted over their heads. The sunlight slanted obliquely across their path, with the impatient heat filtered out of it, always directing her eyes to some different miniature landscape of moss and leaf. She felt calm and strong in the forest, as if some of its endurance had entered into her soul.
It also made her happy to see Rafael here. She began to understand how the quiet but implacable power of the place had shaped him, and had given him and Grete the distinction that she sensed when she saw them for the very first time in the Café Josef.
Once they came out into a swathe of open space where the woodsmen had cut a stand of trees. Clio turned her face up, closing her eyes in the sudden warmth and brightness. Then a shadow blocked the sun again and when she looked she saw that it was Rafael, standing close. He came closer still, putting his hands on the lapels of her jacket and drawing her against him. When he kissed her she felt a white shaft of happiness passing through her like the blade of a sword.
Clio said, ‘I love your woodlands.’
Rafael smiled at her and she was too dazzled to see the sadness in him. ‘Who could be happy for long anywhere it is not possible to enjoy the rest and comfort of trees?’
