by Rosie Thomas
They passed by her table. Alice wanted to stretch out her fingers to touch his coat but she kept them out of sight, twisted together in her lap. Then, after they were seated, she saw the Führer glance in her direction at last.
His eyes seemed to burn straight into her head.
She longed to jump out of her chair and go to him, to invoke her relationship with Grace, to offer anything that might make him notice her properly. But then, after a moment’s examination of her face, he looked away again. He was absorbed in conversation at once.
Alice did not bow her head. She sat upright, with her hands still folded, while the hum of the restaurant went on around her.
Hitler asked Rattenhüber, ‘Who is that lady?’
The answer came quickly. ‘It is a young English Fräulein. Her name is Hirsh. She is staying alone at the Pension Post near the Mauerkirchstrasse.’
‘Hirsh.’
‘That is correct.’
Alice sat at her table until the Führer and his party swept by her. Only long after they had gone did she allow herself to wander back to her silent room at the Pension Post. The next day she was in her place once more, and on the day after that. It was only a matter of waiting patiently enough for the attention that she knew was her due to be bestowed on her.
A day came.
There was the now familiar stir at the door of the Osteria and the gavotte of waiters around the table that was always kept empty. He came in, with his guests, and Alice was certain that they all looked at her.
Today, she thought. There was a suffocating flutter in her chest. Her one good leather handbag was on the floor beside her chair. Automatically she reached down for it and slipped it on to her lap. She snapped the gilt clasp open and rummaged amongst the familiar contents. She was searching for the little gold powder compact that had been her twenty-first birthday present from her aunt and uncle Leominster. There was a mirror inside the lid, and she wanted to be sure that her makeup looked just as she wanted it. Before she found the compact her fingers touched another smooth metal surface, but this was cylindrical, not flat. It was the barrel of a small revolver, a 6.35 Walther.
Alice had paid some attention to the warnings that Julius delivered in Berlin. She had not really believed him when he insisted that it was dangerous to wander around unaccompanied in Hitler’s Germany, but she had decided that she might just as well have some kind of protection. And then in a tiny place in the Alt-Kölln, part pawnbroker’s and part junk shop, she had seen the little gun. It had a pretty pearl handle, and it was cheap.
‘A lady’s gun,’ the shopkeeper had said, smirking a little, when he handed it over.
She found the powder compact. Alice took it out and opened it, glancing at her reflection in the octagon of glass. She frowned and dabbed the pink puff into the well of powder. Then she patted it surreptitiously over her nose until the shine was subdued.
When she looked again she saw that the Führer was watching her. He was sitting with his back straight and his hands clasped on the white cloth in front of him. And then, with his eyes still on her, he inclined his head in a bow of greeting.
Relief and satisfaction and enchantment flooded in a great wave all through Alice’s body. She knew, at last and for certain, that this was her signal. It only remained for her to stand up and cross the restaurant, and to make herself known to him. She had long ago worked out the words she would use.
I have come from England. I am a cousin of Lady Grace Brock, the English Member of Parliament. I have long been an admirer of the Nazi party and, if you will allow me, of Mein Führer. My name is Alice Hirsh …
They were all looking at her now. Alice began to smile, the same smile that Tom Mosley had seen in Grace’s drawing room, a long way off in Vincent Street.
She stood up, her hands still vaguely groping with her leather handbag. Now or never, ran the flicker of thought before she stepped forward. She was doing something, at last, after all the waiting and wishing …
Alice was always physically awkward. As she dashed forward, the dangling strap of her handbag caught over the back of the unoccupied chair facing her own. There was a second while she half turned to tussle with it, but her own forward impetus was too strong. The chair rocked and Alice stumbled with it. Then the bag seemed to twist itself out of her hands and the chair fell with a great crash away from her. Alice overbalanced and fell too, and the contents of her handbag leapt and spread themselves over the floor of the Osteria Bavaria at Hitler’s feet.
She was trapped on all fours between the tables and the legs of the diners. All around her, it seemed, there were people springing up from their places. She had only one thought, and that was to retrieve the contents of her bag, the cosmetics and the little gun, and her purse containing a few marks and a photograph of Nathaniel and Eleanor in the garden at the Woodstock Road. She tried to scramble forward on her hands and knees.
The moving legs and shiny boots were too quick for her. She was surrounded by them. There was a lot of noise, and a thicket of hands snatching for her gun. One of the big boots trampled on her outstretched fingers, and she gave a small yelp of pain.
The hands descended and caught hold of her arms, wrenching at her shoulders. Alice found that she was suddenly hoisted upright.
Somewhere, beyond her confusion, she was reminded of Hyde Park and the way that the Leader had lifted her to safety on to the podium.
She looked round instinctively for Hitler. But all she could see were SS men, angry faces and brown uniforms.
She tried to say, ‘I’m sorry, how stupid,’ but she forgot her few words of German and the English words came out sounding thin and meaningless. Then she saw one of the SS men hand her gun to his captain. And it was only then that she understood how her actions must have appeared. Far too late, the danger of her position struck her like a blow between the eyes.
‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ she whispered.
‘Be quiet,’ the captain ordered viciously.
Her hands were pinned behind her back so tightly that they hurt.
‘Walk,’ one of the SS men commanded. She could smell the sausage and beer on his breath, his face was pushed so close to hers.
For the last time Alice looked around for the Führer, but he had been removed by his bodyguards. There was no hope of protection. These people were all her enemies now.
‘Help me,’ Alice called out into the close air. Nobody moved, except her captors.
The SS men propelled her forward, past the silent diners. She saw the meaty, red faces of the Munich bourgeoisie gaping at her from behind the barriers of the tables.
Outside the Osteria Bavaria Alice was pushed into a black car and driven away.
‘Where is she?’ Eleanor cried.
Nathaniel replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. ‘Julius doesn’t know,’ he answered.
Eleanor’s face crumpled like paper tissue. She was plump and her skin was still unlined, and to her husband she looked like one of her own children helplessly weeping. He knew that he should try to protect her from this, but they had always shared everything and he did not know how to keep secrets from her now.
‘He is afraid that it may be the worst. After what they say she tried to do.’
Julius had been informed by the police in Berlin that Alice had been arrested following an attempt on the Führer’s life in a Munich restaurant. She would be detained as an enemy of the Reich.
That was all. There was no more information.
‘It’s a mistake. Alice wouldn’t have done that,’ Eleanor sobbed. ‘We both of us know what Alice believes.’
‘What do we really know?’ Nathaniel murmured.
It seemed that with the approach of old age he had lost the order that had once been the kernel of the old house. With Eleanor, he had been the spine and the skull of the family. Their children had been strong limbs that had once moved independently but as part of the whole body. But now he felt that the limbs were broken off, and they twitched pa
infully out of reach of the messages that his brain tried to convey. He sat in his old desk chair and watched his wife weeping.
‘I shall have to go to Germany,’ Nathaniel said.
‘I’ll go back to Berlin and find her,’ Rafael told Clio.
They were sitting at the round table, watching the last butter-yellow sunlight fading on the roofs of the houses across the street. Romy had fallen asleep on her bed with her thumb in the triangular soft pocket of her mouth.
Clio was frightened. All the dark terrors of the last days in Berlin had dropped around her again like a curtain falling over a window.
‘Romy and I will come with you. We must all stay together.’
‘No.’
Rafael never argued, and he rarely denied her anything. But Clio knew that his refusal was absolute. She thought of poor, confused and unhappy Alice in some prison or camp, and then she looked across to the open door of Romy’s bedroom. She felt the dead weight of inevitable misery pressing on her shoulders.
‘You don’t have to go back to Berlin for Alice’s sake,’ she attempted.
‘I think I do.’
He would go to do what he could for Alice, although he did not have much hope that he could reach her. But the memory of his own time in the camp was still vivid, and he could not stay comfortably in Paris with the thought that Clio’s sister was suffering in the same way.
Alice’s capture filled him with fear and with a paradoxical blind determination to help her whatever might come, but in another more rational part of himself it only crystallized a need that he had felt for a long time. Rafael believed that he had slipped away from his people and his country, and left behind responsibilities that he ought to have stayed to share. Perhaps, he thought now, his unwilling return might help to absolve some of the guilt that clung to him.
‘When?’ Clio made herself ask. It struck her now that this moment had always been lying in wait for them, beyond the precious happiness of their time in Paris. It was for that very reason that it had been so precious to all of them.
‘As soon as I can. Tomorrow.’
Julius was living in an apartment block in a cocoa-brown street not far from Clio’s old place at Frau Kleber’s. When the street bell rang up through the murky hall he went out on to his balcony and looked down into the road. The windows to the left and right of him were showing their Nazi flags, but his own was bare.
Nathaniel was standing with his face turned up to Julius’s windows. He looked exhausted after his hurried journey.
Julius turned back into the room. Rafael was sitting reading in the one armchair. They had not spoken to each other in the last hour, because there was nothing at all to say. All their enquiries after Alice had met with silence and – worse than silence – narrow suspicion. The unexpected ringing of the street bell had jerked their heads up and set them sniffing the air like dogs.
‘My father is here,’ Julius said.
He opened the outer door and drew Nathaniel inside the shelter of the building before he opened his arms to him. Then the two men embraced, Julius holding Nathaniel as if he were the father and not the son.
‘Is there any news?’ were Nathaniel’s first words.
‘None. Not yet,’ Julius said. ‘You should have told me you were arriving today. I would have come to the station to meet you.’
Rafael stood up, putting his book down carefully on the arm of his chair. He heard the two men coming heavy-footed up the stairs, and then in the doorway he saw a broad black-and-grey-bearded patriarch with a lined, clever, humorous and weary face. Clio’s father. Romy’s grandfather, he thought. The generations that had seemed caught between Clio and himself spun away freely, reaching back into the past and on, unseeably, into the future.
He wished then for a happier meeting ground.
He held out his hand. ‘Rafael Wolf,’ he said.
And Nathaniel’s great smile when he saw him even wiped away, for a moment, the sombre concerns that had led them both to Berlin.
‘My son,’ Nathaniel said.
Julius stood behind him, taller but much thinner and more fragile-seeming than his father, and smiled too.
‘We have been doing what we can,’ Rafael explained later. ‘It is not very much, I am afraid to say.’
The three men had gone out to a workmen’s café in the neighbourhood. They sat in the back of the room, in the shadow of a high counter, and were served soup and Würste by an indifferent girl in a stained apron. Nathaniel saw the faces in the streets and the customers in this shabby bar.
‘There are Jews here,’ he murmured. ‘Living openly. It cannot be so bad.’
Julius dipped his spoon into the soup. ‘There are perhaps half as many of us left as there were before Hitler came to power. Every day there are fewer. There are streets we can no longer walk in – the Kurfürstendamm, Wilhelmstrasse – and many Jews no longer go to public theatres or concert halls or cinemas for fear of the Nazis. Our children are unable to go to the state schools. I could not guess how many Jewish homes and businesses have been destroyed. Or how many Jews have been rounded up and sent to the camps.’
Julius looked at Rafael. ‘Rafael and I cannot work in Berlin. But life of a kind still goes on. The synagogues are still open. You will find us in places like this, sitting in the darkest corners, not daring to ask one another what will happen.’
‘Yet you are still here,’ Nathaniel said.
‘I was preparing to leave,’ Julius told him. ‘Rafael did right. He left Berlin and went to Paris to be in the open and to live a life with Clio instead of existing in the shadows here.’
Rafael put down his spoon. Very courteously he told Julius, ‘I did not do right. I felt that all the time I was in Paris, I should have been here, where I belong.’
He thought of the little rooms in the Marais, and the cradle that he had made for Romy, and of Clio working at her typewriter with her dark head bent and her shorter hair revealing the soft nape of her neck. He wanted to close his eyes, to bring them closer, but he looked steadily at Clio’s father and brother instead. He could see the family likeness in the wings of their eyebrows and the mobile lines of their mouths.
But yet, none of them resembled each other as closely as Clio and Grace did. He had never spoken of that to Clio. She was proud of her physical likeness to Julius.
The first twins, the mothers, must reflect one another like images in a glass.
‘But you had been in Oranienburg,’ Nathaniel excused him.
‘All the more reason to stay. I survived that. It is survivable.’
Rafael suddenly smiled. He reached his hand across the table to cover Nathaniel’s and Nathaniel, who for all his command of languages also believed that physical gestures spoke more eloquently, turned his own palm upwards to clasp it.
Rafael told him, ‘I am glad to be in Berlin now. We will find Alice, and get her back somehow.’
For the first time since he had arrived in Berlin Nathaniel began to believe that it might be possible.
‘Can you think of anything you might be able to do, beyond the official channels?’
Nathaniel had already been to see the British Ambassador and the Police Commandant. Their response had been to warn him, as if he had not understood as much, that Alice was accused of a very serious crime.
‘Julius and I are doing the best we can through the unofficial connections.’ Except that, as Rafael had discovered, so many of the old cells and links that had centred on the Café Josef were broken.
It was Julius who answered him, the obvious answer. ‘There is Grace.’
Grace stared into the green glass shade of the reading lamp on her desk. The bulb within made a soft yellowish glow and her unfocused eyes made a clearing of it, a sunny clearing in a grass-green forest. Realizing that her mind was wandering Grace sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. It had been a long day, and she would have liked to let her head fall against the back of her chair so that the weight of sleep could drag her effortlessl
y downwards.
Alice.
The stupidity of what the child had done almost blinded her.
Grace had no doubt that Alice had made some clumsy mistake in her unfathomable double pursuit of admiration and Nazi glory. Tom Mosley had told her enough to enable her to guess what Alice might have been up to. But to drop a revolver at the feet of Hitler and a dozen SS men seemed beyond the bounds of gaucherie even for Alice.
And this evening Julius had telephoned from Berlin. It had been a bad connection and his voice had crackled and faded before suddenly sparking in her ear, as clear as if he had been standing beside her.
‘Grace, can you help us again?’
It had given her an odd shock of pleasure to hear him.
She had found herself answering, ‘If I can, of course I will,’ while all the time she was listening just to the sound of his words.
The call had been very short. After he was gone she sat thinking, holding the comforting link of the receiver against her throat.
She imagined Julius and Nathaniel, and Rafael whom she disliked, alone together in the thick stew of Berlin. Perhaps they were in the Café Josef, or whatever the place had been called, where Rafael used to go to stir up his communist potions. What would they do, the three of them, to try to secure Alice’s release from the Nazis?
When she thought about it, Grace guessed that the Hirshes were probably ready to blame her for what had happened because of her political influence on Alice. But Grace was clear-sighted enough to recognize that whatever effect she had had on the child, it was much less significant than the incoherent longings that came from within Alice herself.
Please help us.
They might secretly blame, but they were also willing to appeal to her. And Grace wanted to respond, not so much for Alice, the little idiot, but for Julius’s sake. Only it was much more difficult than the Hirshes in their naïvety imagined.
Grace had been severely reprimanded by the Foreign Office for failing to follow the official channels in her last petition for a German prisoner.
