House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  HAMPSHIRE, NOVEMBER

  Greta sowed hundreds and hundreds of seeds in trays of compost. She could neither sleep nor eat. Nanny refused to let her walk Benjamin in his perambulator, objecting that she pushed it at such a frantic speed that she had broken off a wheel on a rut and, according to Nanny, caused him to suffer indigestion. But Greta couldn’t walk slowly. She couldn’t read or write letters or settle to anything. All she could do was rake out the sweetly rotting compost and push seed after seed into the pliant earth with her thumb.

  Otto had not written a cheque since September, or certainly none had arrived. Before then, one had appeared at the bank in Switzerland every two weeks, reliable as a rabbi on his way to Friday prayers. If only Albert was here to share in her anxiety, but his ship was not expected to dock for another fortnight. She felt alone and untethered in her misery. Her earliest memory was of Otto, peering at her through the bars of her cot. Sometimes he would fetch slices of toast and poke them through to her, while she roared, obediently playing the lion. Otto who had quietly, unobtrusively devoted himself to rescuing her from muddles of her own creation.

  Lord Goldbaum ventured out to the greenhouse in his attempt to console her. He talked while she placed tray after tray of smooth black earth on racks.

  ‘There are a hundred reasons why the cheques might have stopped,’ he said. ‘He might be too far from a bank for the recipient to cash them. The transport that took them might have been halted. The local bank may have decided no longer to cash them – despite our best efforts, it’s possible the money did not always arrive.’

  ‘Or he might be dead,’ said Greta, not stopping her work.

  ‘That is a possibility,’ Lord Goldbaum was forced to admit. ‘But it is only one of many possibilities.’

  She took his hand, vaguely aware that she was dirtying his pristine cuffs with soil. ‘It is kind to give me hope, but not false hope.’

  And then, a few days later, Albert was gone, too. No one said officially that he was dead, only missing with his ship. The Wentworth had been hit by a U-boat lurking close to an Atlantic minefield and the passenger list was published in the Times. How could both men be missing at once? How was she to bear such a thing? Greta kissed her children, instructing the nurses with some ferocity not to tell them or to treat them with extra kindness or pity.

  She took turns to worry over each man. First Albert, then Otto. Then Albert again. She walked through her garden in the rain. She wore only a thin coat and in minutes she was soaked to the skin, but the cold was a relief. When she had arrived in England she was lonely, but she had always been so. She dutifully loved her parents, and of course there was Otto, but beyond these familial threads, there had been little that bound her. Now there was Albert, and her children. Her love for them was not a thread but a rope, muscular and visceral.

  She knew Albert adored Celia. His daughter amused and exasperated him with her willfulness and cleverness. If he really was dead, would Celia remember him? At least Greta could tell her how her father felt about her, and Celia would know what she had lost. Greta tried to imagine telling Benjamin about Albert. Your father loved you, she would say, because that’s what one does. But the love Albert felt for Benjamin was a reflex, an obligatory parental attachment. He hadn’t had an opportunity for deeper love to unfurl.

  ‘How am I to raise a boy alone?’ Greta wondered aloud.

  Benjamin was the heir to the bank and the dynasty, and it would fall to her to teach him all that meant. Benjamin would not understand for years, and soon grief and loss would become part of their childhood, an inhabitant of the nursery as familiar as the spinning globe.

  There were tactful columns written about Lord Goldbaum’s missing son, a scion lost at sea. The convoy remained in the Atlantic. He might yet be found. Greta sought out Lord Goldbaum. They nurtured each other’s anxiety. She took him seedlings, which she lined up on his windowsills, squeezed in between eighteenth-century Kändler porcelain figurines. She picked up one of the parrots and hurled it to the floor and watched it shatter. He uttered no rebuke. What did it matter? It was a mere thing. A beautiful object that money could buy.

  Lady Goldbaum refused to discuss it. Her son was not dead, merely missing. He had been lost before. He had often disappeared for hours as a child, walking for miles in his pursuit of a moth or beetle and not coming back until long after dark, when half the house had turned out to search for him. This was the same. He would come back. She’d learned not to worry.

  Greta and Lord Goldbaum would not argue with her. Perhaps she was right. There was no knowing and, if not, then they were glad not to face her fears as well as their own. A mother grieving for her dead son – to look at such a loss straight-on was like staring into the sun.

  There was no more space in the potting sheds. Every shelf and workbench was covered in seed trays. Greta had not thought where they would all be planted out in spring. She could not think beyond this minute, this hour. The very thought that spring would come was an affront. Yet, indifferent and unyielding, the seasons turned. Gales blew down the last of the browning leaves and brought down one of Albert’s oaks in the park. It lay upended like a great wounded thing, its filthy muddy roots reaching up into the sky and its branches splintered and smashed on the ground, the world topsy-turvy. She refused to have it cut down and sawn up for firewood. In her mind it was Albert or Otto lying there. To remove the corpse was to admit, finally, that they were dead.

  The endless uncertainty exhausted her, while the ache of missing Albert was a physical pain. She felt constantly as if she was about to get the flu, but it never came. Her joints ached and she sweated through the night. Sometimes in her dreams he was in her bed, both of them naked. She kissed him, pulling him towards her and whispering little pleas in his ear that he make love to her, but, laughing, he’d refuse and tease her with his fingertips, blow warm breath across her belly or slide down her body with the lightest ghost of a touch, until she thought she couldn’t bear it any longer. Still, sometimes it was enough, and she’d wake up flooded with pleasure and pierced with sudden joy – he might be alive. Then, as the pleasure ebbed away, she lay alone in her bed, filled with self-loathing for surrendering to hope. She told herself it would be kinder to give up, that hope only tormented her, but she could not. She knew she ought to cry. It was expected. Everyone watched her, waiting for her tears, but they would not come. She did not want to cry, but to scream until her throat hurt.

  At dusk she walked down to the river and watched rain dimple the surface. The tide was low, and the river slunk through its channel, unable to fill the muddy banks. She picked up a pebble and cast it into the water, watching the ripples spill outwards. We leave pebbles beside a grave, thought Greta, but these disappear and sink, because you are not dead yet. Neither of you is dead until I believe it, and I don’t. She tried to utter a prayer, but it stuck in her throat like a fishbone. Besides, was it enough simply to ask God, to beseech him with wails and supplications that he listen? She did not need one prayer granted, but two. She wanted both Albert and Otto to come back to her. A tiny voice inside her head whispered, If you could only choose one man to live, who would you save?

  Albert, came her answer, swiftly and unforced. She had children and they needed their father. It was not her choice, but theirs. She recognised this was a lie. The truth is that I love Albert more.

  Greta’s heart began to beat frantically. She had made an accidental deal with God: if Albert lived, and Otto died, then she had killed her brother with this bargain. She knew her thinking was half-mad, the ravings of dread and loss, but at that moment beside the grey river it seemed more real than anything else.

  The sky was dark and bright at once, the moon rising amid the last rays of the sun. She longed for Albert, but remained unsure if she was tormented by desire for a dead man.

  TEPLUSHKA TRAIN, RUSSIA, NOVEMBER

  Otto lay on his bunk and looked out at the snow. It was a colourless beauty, infinite and cold. He would never l
eave this train, he was resigned to that. It ran day and night, rattling his dreams. Sometimes other carriages were attached, ones just like this – wooden box cars with wooden bunks against the walls and a single metal stove in the middle. The men mostly crouched around the stove, greedy for heat, and fought for a bunk furthest from the unglazed windows. Not Otto. He no longer noticed the cold and he liked to see Russia, the acres of unbroken white, the smudged forests of black trees. Once, when the train stopped at night, he woke to see a wolf just outside the window, watching him unblinking with yellow eyes.

  He wanted just to slide away into the darkness with the wolf, to disappear across the snow, and for a few days he refused to eat. But Karl was so upset that he relented. Now he ate, allowing the boy to spoon-feed him mouthfuls from the communal soup pot that was presented to them twice each day.

  ‘We’ll be at the camp soon,’ Karl whispered, trying to console himself more than Otto.

  Otto nodded. They would never reach a camp. The train was the destination. It took the prisoners from place to place, from nowhere to nowhere, never stopping longer than was necessary to collect coal or wood or soup, or more prisoners. Some had been in a camp before, working in the fields in the summer, and they listened with reverence to their stories, but all ended the same way. Winter came and then snow. There was no grass to scythe, no seeds to sow, and they were loaded back onto the teplushka train.

  Otto secreted his edelweiss seeds in a crack inside the window frame, where they were safe from the winds but wrapped in a cocoon of ice. Sometimes he dreamed it was him smothered in ice, but he could still hear them talking about him. ‘Can’t understand how he’s not dead yet. They won’t notice. Let him stay frozen in his bunk, they’ll still send soup for twelve.’ It always finished with Karl offering to fight any man who wouldn’t shut up.

  Karl climbed into the bunk beside him. They all had to share, and no one else wanted to be near Otto. His whistling throat unnerved them, and the hole in his neck was swelling shut. Sometimes his skin was so blue that even Otto thought he must be dead. Karl lay against him, his body as warm as bread from the oven.

  ‘It’s my fault. It’s all my fault we’re here,’ whispered Karl. ‘They hadn’t noticed we were Jews.’

  Otto tutted in disagreement. Sooner or later they would have had to leave the hospital in any case.

  ‘It’s all right. I have a plan,’ said Karl. ‘Haven’t you noticed that there are fewer guards now? No one seems to know who is in charge.’

  Otto shrugged. He had not noticed.

  ‘We’ve been all the way north to Siberia, but we’re heading south again now, towards European Russia. At one of the stations when we stop, we’ll just disappear. No one will notice. I don’t think they’ll even care.’

  ‘What then?’ signed Otto.

  ‘We’re going home.’

  Otto wanted to laugh, but Karl’s expression was so serious that he daren’t.

  ‘We are. We’re going home, even if we have to walk the whole way.’

  The carriages were usually kept locked, but the bolts were weak and not always drawn; mostly the guards relied on the fact that the prisoners had no desire to escape. They were surrounded by miles upon miles of frozen tundra.

  There was a bang and the train door opened. Two men ventured out, returning with the bucket of soup.

  ‘Cabbage,’ said one.

  ‘And maggots,’ complained another, pointing to a wriggling creature.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the first. ‘They’re spätzle noodles.’

  ‘See?’ said Karl. ‘It’ll be easy. We just go to get soup and don’t come back.’

  Otto nodded. Sure, why not. It was a safe promise.

  Over the next few days, even Otto noticed that there were fewer and fewer guards. There were whispers of another revolution, but all that the men on the teplushka train knew was that it made longer and longer stops, sometimes at stations and sometimes simply halting on the line, with empty snowfields or forests stretching out for ever. Then, on the third day, the soup only arrived once, instead of twice; and on the fourth, the stove ran out of wood. The train stopped in the middle of a vast boreal forest of larch, pine and spruce. And a guard came and opened the door, ordering them out.

  ‘Go and fetch wood for your stoves. Find enough that you don’t freeze your balls off tonight.’

  ‘What’s to stop us escaping?’ asked Karl.

  The guard laughed. ‘Nothing. Be my guest. Sure, the wolves will get you. Or you’ll die of hunger and cold. Either way, it saves me a good deal of trouble.’

  The men jumped down from the car, pulling thin jackets around their ears and stamping to keep warm. Otto lay on his bunk, too weak to get up. Karl slid his arm around him and, ignoring Otto’s protestations, half-dragged him off the train. Snow lay in drifts, making tide-marks high up the trunks of the trees. The train ruptured the stillness of the forest. The tracks stretched in both directions as far as Otto could see. Karl dragged him from the line of carriages, pulling him through the snow until they were a little distance away. He propped him against a spruce tree. It smelled pleasantly medicinal, and Otto rubbed the needles between his fingers. The needles were oily and almost blue in the cold light.

  ‘This is our moment,’ said Karl, his eyes gleaming, a sheen of sweat on his top lip.

  Otto smiled, still hoping that he was joking.

  Karl reached into his pocket and placed something in Otto’s hand. ‘Your edelweiss seeds,’ he said, taking them back again. ‘I’ll only give them to you if you come with me.’

  Otto studied Karl. He still had the face of a boy, but thin and hardened. His eyes were the blue-green of the spruce. He reached out and took Karl’s hand, placing his fingers over the hole in his throat, so that he could whisper.

  ‘If you go, you will probably die. If I come with you, you certainly shall.’

  Karl tried to take back his hand, but Otto gripped it with surprising strength.

  ‘Don’t go home. Go to England. Take the edelweiss seeds. Plant them in spring and, when you reach England, give them to my sister. Lie to her. Tell her I didn’t suffer.’

  Karl shook his head. ‘I won’t go without you.’

  ‘This is a good place to die.’ Otto looked about him, admiring the snow-caps on the trees. Here and there the trunks were speckled with bright-green moss. Above, the sky was a clear, unbroken blue. The train was hidden by the forest, and they could almost be alone. ‘Yes, I would very much like to die here with you,’ he whispered. ‘Please.’

  He took Karl’s hands and placed one over his mouth and nose and the other over the hole in his throat. For a minute, Karl did not resist, and Otto felt the soft warmth of his skin. And then, revolted, Karl wrenched them away.

  ‘I’m not going to murder you.’

  ‘It would be the kindest murder in the world.’

  Karl started to sob. Furious tears streaked his cheeks, and he shook his head, his hands clenched in fists by his side.

  ‘Then go,’ said Otto, exhausted. ‘Always look for Jews. They will help you.’

  Not bothering to wipe away his tears, Karl leaned forward and kissed his friend. Then, steeling himself with a shudder, he once again placed his hands over Otto’s mouth, nose and the wound on his throat. Otto closed his eyes and found himself struggling against Karl, flailing with all his strength against the death he wanted. Karl released him with a cry and sat back in the snow.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Otto, but I can’t.’

  Otto patted his shoulders, unable to speak. His throat burned and he could hardly breathe through the swelling hole. He raised a hand and pointed to the wood. Karl stood, still hesitating, and then with one last look at Otto, he turned and ran.

  Otto felt sweat trickle from his forehead and sting his eyes. He prayed the boy would live. He offered God his own life in exchange for that of the boy. He looked up at the sky, pierced by the trees. He smelled pine and spruce. Somewhere a bird sang. The train lu
rked behind the trees, waiting to swallow him back up. He would not let it. He picked up a spruce needle and placed it in the tear in his throat, then another and another, until the hole was sealed up. He coughed and kicked out, his legs scrabbling in the snow. Falling back, he looked up at the cloudless sky.

  HAMPSHIRE, NOVEMBER

  Watching the flakes drift lazily past the window of the East Gallery after luncheon, Greta was reminded viscerally of home. She remembered those afternoons as a child with Otto, sitting at the nursery window watching for the first flakes – the sheer thrill of knowing that in the morning when they woke the world would be transformed. Vienna was a city always waiting for winter. It managed it with such panache: the streets rang with the bells from horse-drawn sleighs, the lamps lit in the afternoon. With melancholy settling in her chest like a cough, Greta pulled on her coat and went outside for a walk, declining all offers of company. Everyone meant well, but she wanted only to be alone.

  The low hedges of the parterre were dusted with snow, the leaves on the cyclamen curled and frosted. The statues in the fountains mimed their bathing rituals without water, the mechanisms seized with ice. She tramped her way out into the arboretum, walking between the vast conifer specimens, the branches dipped in snow. She looked up through the green of the trees at the heavy grey of the sky. She paused; the house was hidden behind the trees and, in the muffled hush, she could almost imagine herself in a forest somewhere far from here. Yet rising through the pines was the familiar ooze of Solent mud, the two worlds of snow-covered forest and the Fontmell river jammed up against each other. She had read how, in Japan, mourners are often haunted by their dead, but casting about among the blue-green of the spruce, Greta was aware only that she was alone.

  ‘Why won’t you haunt me?’ she called. ‘Why did you both leave me?’

  She was furious with them both. They had left her so thoroughly alone, bereft even of ghosts. She closed her eyes and took a breath, feeling the unhappiness swell in her chest. It lodged there like a solid bead. My grief is ordinary and commonplace, she reasoned. Half the women on the estate are red-eyed from weeping, the streets are thick with widows. Yet the ubiquity of grief did nothing to lessen hers. It seemed crueller that the world did not stop to acknowledge the unfairness and horror of her double loss. Greta had to force herself to say their names: Otto. Albert. She always paused for a fraction of a second before saying them, like hesitating before popping a blister, anticipating the sharp prick of pain.