He used one of the coins to buy a tram fare heading south. The conductor eyed him suspiciously – it was a lot of money for a young boy to have – but Alfred kept his eyes down and waited, hand outstretched, for the conductor to count out the change onto his open palm. He didn’t want to go too far on the tram, in case he got lost in a part of town he’d never been to before, so he disembarked a few stops early and began to walk. It had snowed briefly earlier in the day, but the ground was still too warm for the frost to take hold. Nevertheless, the wind was icy and stung his face and neck as he walked and walked and walked, one hand gripping his coat tightly shut, in the direction of the place he’d seen Johanna the week before. When he arrived at a crossroads that looked completely unfamiliar, he began to panic and called on his voice-women to help him, but they remained silent. Perhaps they were punishing him for his disobedience; he wasn’t sure, but it was too late now, anyway. Salomon, Robert, Simon – his friends for the past four years were on their way to the train station to be shipped to England, a safe place, safer than here. His heart thumped in his chest and he felt a sudden stab of regret, but then dug his fingernails into his palms. Johanna was here somewhere, and all he had to do was find her. Then he would be safe, too.
When he finally reached Grunewaldstraße, he almost wept with relief, before realising that this was just the beginning of his search. For a long while, he stood on the corner of the street, close to the tram stop, just waiting. He remained there, shivering, until a man with an angry dog passed by him and he had to step aside. He could really feel the cold now. Tired and freezing and not knowing what else to do, he crept into some bushes that lined a small square of grass set back from the street, and lay down.
The first thing he heard on waking was a hissing sound, like air being let out of a tire.
Sssssssssssssss.
Then: Pssssst. Alfred.
He tried to sit up, but he was suddenly beset by a series of spasms that seemed to shake up all the bones in his body.
Try rubbing your legs together. There. Now your hands. See? Get some of that cold out of your body.
Alfred did as he was told, and soon he was able to move his limbs again, albeit stiffly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
Well it’s too late for that now. But you need to stand up and move about before you freeze to death.
Alfred got to his feet and scrambled out of the bushes. A group of early-morning commuters were standing at the tram stop. A man, wearing a hat at an angle, so that only one of his eyes was visible, kept looking suspiciously in Alfred’s direction. So Alfred kept his distance and crossed the road, to the side where he had seen Johanna. He was hungry and thirsty, and worst of all, he had no idea where to start looking. He was shivering; the cold seemed to have penetrated his body through to the bone, and he thought he would never be warm again. From a distance, he heard police whistles; instinctively, he dodged into a house entrance that led into a series of back yards. The sun had climbed high enough to light up a small corner of the first yard, and here he went and sat to warm up until he was chased off by a red-faced woman wielding a carpet beater.
Have faith, little one. Be patient.
Alfred stalked the street for almost two hours until he began to feel faint from the cold and lack of food. His small suitcase, though containing only a few items of clothing, his toothbrush, a pad and pencil, and a penknife he’d received on his last birthday, seemed to weigh a ton. He walked to the top of the street, switching the suitcase from one side to the other to alleviate the pain in his shoulders. Situated here was a small square, enclosed by some eight shops, an apothecary shop and a bakery, the latter emitting a smell so heavenly that Alfred stood open-mouthed in front of the glass, hoping that the fragrance of freshly baked bread alone might assuage his hunger. But when the saleswoman behind the glass looked up sharply and caught him staring, he quickly moved on.
Back down to the tram stop, back up to the square. Finally, when his legs threatened to buckle beneath him, he laid his suitcase down flat on the pavement outside the apothecary shop, sat down and wept. He didn’t care about the passers-by, didn’t bother to cover his face in his hands, and when one of the voice-women called his name, he ignored her. A hand touched his shoulder.
‘Alfred. I can’t believe it. Is that you?’
Alfred shrugged the hand away.
‘Alfred! It’s me! Johanna!’
And suddenly the hand became an arm, a body, an embrace that lifted him almost off his feet. He pressed his face into her hair and breathed in, sobbing loudly now. They remained in this position for a long time, until Johanna took a step back, still clutching his shoulders with both hands.
‘You’re so tall!’ she exclaimed, her face as wet as his. ‘And filthy,’ she added, attempting a laugh that turned into weeping momentarily.
‘I’m so hungry,’ Alfred said before he could stop himself.
Johanna nodded furiously. ‘Yes. Stay here. I’ll be right back.’ And she hurried off towards the bakery, coming out a short while later with a paper bag full of pastries. She handed him the bag and stooped to pick up his case. ‘Come on, Alfred darling. Let’s go home.’
‘Home’ turned out to be an enormous, turn-of-the-century apartment on the bel étage of a nearby building on Barbarossastraße. Johanna unlocked the front door and led Alfred inside, turning to stroke his face again and again, as though to make sure he was no illusion. She helped him out of his coat and hung it up.
‘Johanna, is that you?’
A thin, high-pitched voice rang through the apartment.
‘Yes, Franziska. It’s me,’ Johanna answered and then smiled at Alfred.
‘Did you get everything?’ the voice asked.
‘Of course.’
Johanna pulled a white paper bag out of her coat pocket. ‘Just wait here,’ she said to Alfred, and left him standing in the hall, torn between wanting to burst into song and yet paralysed with fear that he might be lost in some dream, or that he might have died of cold in the bushes during the night. He didn’t dare move in case he broke the spell. From the depths of the apartment, he heard the mumblings of a conversation. Shortly afterwards, Johanna returned.
‘Come with me,’ she said purposefully. ‘Remember to speak only when spoken to. And just follow my lead.’
She grabbed his hand and took him through a large room with a parquet floor in a herringbone design, full of dark, heavy furniture and ornate wall hangings, the stucco on the ceiling as pretty as cake icing, to another narrow hallway, from which he could count at least four further rooms leading off. Johanna stopped in front of a set of double doors, knocked lightly and stepped in.
‘Franziska, this is the boy.’ She tugged at Alfred’s hand and he followed her in. It was a south-facing room, but the light was drowsy. The curtains were drawn, with only a smudge of light coming from a small table lamp in the corner. When his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he could make out a large room, with pristine stucco on the ceilings, the walls almost entirely covered in paintings, large and small, and an old woman sitting in a high-backed chair, her eyes closed and her head leaning against the backrest. Her very white hair was pinned up in an elaborate hairdo, atop of which sat a large peacock feather that quivered as she breathed. There was a sharp pungency in the air, a smell Alfred couldn’t identify.
‘What?’ the woman said hoarsely, her eyelids flickering. She wore an old-fashioned-looking velvet dress with a full-length skirt and a high lace collar.
‘The boy, Franziska,’ Johanna said. ‘The one I told you about.’
‘Oh. The boy. Of course.’
‘Yes. The one I hired to do the handiwork. The odd jobs.’
Johanna gestured for Alfred to step forwards. As he did so, the old woman jerked her head off the backrest. The peacock feather trembled violently. ‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Alfred Werner,’ he answered, his voice cracking.
The woman let out a long sigh and let her head drop back on the chair
. ‘Very well,’ she said, and smiled.
Johanna took Alfred’s hand again and led him out, closing the door gently behind her. ‘Let’s get you a glass of milk,’ she said, before stopping in her tracks and hugging him closely. ‘Oh, Alfred. I never thought I’d – ’ She paused and wiped her eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Come on, this way.’
Alfred and Johanna spent the rest of the morning in the kitchen, close to the hearth for warmth. They were captivated with one another, and as the sky outside turned grey and a thick snow began to cover the ground, they sat and talked. Occasionally, Johanna would get up and potter about the kitchen, soaking dishes and clearing things into cupboards. She was still as beautiful as he remembered, her hair – dark like their father’s – was long and glossy, but something about her demeanour was very different. She had grown, of course, but it was more than a physical maturing. Alfred could not quite put his finger on it. They shared their stories with one another, tentatively at first, and then in outpourings of excitement, laughter, incredulity and grief. Johanna wanted to hear all about Alfred’s past four years, but he feigned tiredness and made her tell him her story first.
After Alfred and Marie had been taken from the cottage (‘I begged him to let me find you,’ Johanna wept. ‘But he wouldn’t, and I wasn’t strong enough to fight him.’), Johanna and Emil had been taken up to live in the large house. As a senior member of the National Socialist Party – and one of the party’s more generous benefactors – Fritz von Markstein had had his adoption application processed smoothly and rapidly. He had, as Anno Schmidt had surmised, required an heir, and Emil’s striking Aryan looks and obedient manner had suited his requirements perfectly. Johanna had been chosen, so he informed her on the evening of her arrival, as a serving girl, and, as she discovered during the preceding months, something more. There were no visits from the youth welfare office either before, during, or after the adoption procedure. Thus, there was no welfare officer to witness von Markstein’s steady decline into alcoholism and the abuse of his adopted daughter.
‘I arrived here six months ago,’ she said in a strained voice, and Alfred recognised the voice of a much older woman when she spoke. It was this – a maturity beyond her years, marks of age on her face incongruous on a sixteen-year-old girl, that he had noticed earlier. ‘I was . . . he had – ’ She got up to stoke the fire and add another briquette of coal. ‘I was carrying his child,’ she said finally.
‘I don’t understand,’ Alfred said.
She reached out and stroked his face. ‘No. You don’t, do you?’ She gave him a sad smile. ‘But then, after he sent me here, I lost the baby. And I decided to stay. Franziska – Frau von Markstein – is his aunt. She’s harmless. At least . . . ’ Johanna smoothed down her skirt, ‘when she’s kept happy.’
‘And Emil?’ Alfred said, dying to hear news of his brother.
Johanna let out a bitter laugh. ‘Emil has turned into a fine young man,’ she said. ‘A fine, upstanding member of the Reich. Group leader of his Hitlerjugend division, no less. Three shoulder pips at the last count.’ She spat into the fire.
Alfred waited for her to sit down again. ‘What about Marie?’ he asked hesitantly.
Johanna closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Oh, Mariechen,’ she said. ‘It was her sixth birthday last week, wasn’t it?’
Alfred nodded and hoped his face wouldn’t betray his shame. His baby sister’s birthday had never crossed his mind.
‘When I arrived here, I contacted the orphanage straight away,’ Johanna said. ‘I was so full of hope that I’d find you both there, safe and sound.’ She wrung her hands. ‘But there was no record of you – Alfred, where have you been? – and Marie had been adopted almost immediately. That’s no surprise really – she was such a sweet and pretty little girl. They wouldn’t give me any information on her whereabouts. But I’m sure . . . ’ her voice faltered slightly. ‘I’m sure we’ll find her one day. Just like we found each other.’ She leaned forward and kissed Alfred on the forehead, just like his mother used to do.
In return, Alfred told his sister, in as much detail as he could recall, about his time at the Waisenhaus: his friends, his football skills, the experience of sharing a bedroom with twelve others, the kindness of the staff and exoticness of sabbath worship.
‘I’m glad they were so good to you,’ Johanna remarked tenderly. The only thing he concealed from her, something far more than a mere detail, was the voices.
When a grandfather clock somewhere in the apartment struck four, Johanna got to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you around.’
She led him out of the kitchen, which was at the far end of the apartment, and back through the long corridor, stopping to look in the rooms. Closest to the kitchen was a very small, narrow room that appeared to be used as a store room. Then a larger room, with a bed, table and chair, a dark wooden wardrobe and very expensive-looking rugs and curtains. This was Johanna’s room. The front of the apartment contained two enormous reception rooms, whose ceilings were even higher than those in the rest of the apartment and also decorated with elaborate stucco. In each of these rooms, a chandelier hung, dripping with crystals. Overall, Alfred counted a total of six rooms, plus the kitchen and a small bathroom. When they passed by Frau von Markstein’s room, on tiptoe, Alfred remembered how Johanna had introduced him.
‘What did you mean when you said to her “It’s the boy”?’ he asked, when they were back in the kitchen.
Johanna shrugged. ‘I made it up, on the spur of the moment. The old woman is . . . confused. If I tell her we’d talked about hiring a boy, then she believes me.’
Although the flat was impossibly large for two – and now three – people, Alfred spent the first months sharing a bed with Johanna. They slept soundly, limbs entwined, desperate for the warmth and tenderness they’d had to forgo over the years. It was only when Alfred woke one morning to find the sheet beneath him damp and shamefully sticky, that Johanna wordlessly made up a bed for him in the adjoining room.
Late one night in November, Johanna woke him in the dark and took him up to the attic. The roof slanted at a steep angle and they had to crouch to get to the small round window at the front of the house. Before Alfred could ask her what they were doing up there, as it was cold and he was shaking in his thin nightgown, she opened the window. They watched as great curls of smoke rose from buildings all over the city, saw groups of men with stones and torches yelling and cheering. They watched in silence until they were too tired to keep their eyes open, so they clambered back downstairs and into bed. The following morning, the pavements of the city were covered in a million shards of glass.
The weeks rushed by, past Christmas (Alfred’s first Christmas in four years; he and Johanna celebrated quietly with a meal of jellied carp and potato salad, but no gifts to speak of – Franziska von Markstein rarely left her room and made no exception on this occasion), past New Year, past Johanna’s seventeenth birthday, until Alfred finally felt at ease wandering through the large apartment, emptying the tiled coal ovens of ash, relighting fires, fixing broken chairs and whacking the dust out of carpets on a metal bar installed on the large front-facing balcony. He almost felt at home.
Spring arrived, meteorologically speaking, but the winter retained a severe grip on the city. The Reich had recently expanded to the south with great fanfare, and Berlin seemed to be carried on a tide of vicious, almost hysterical, optimism. One morning in early April, Alfred set out with Johanna on one of her outings to shop for groceries and meat, order a delivery of coal, and post some letters. On their way back, they stopped outside the apothecary shop, the very one Alfred had sat outside when Johanna found him.
‘Wait here,’ she instructed, and entered the shop. Alfred stood outside, stamping his feet against the cold. Several metres away, he saw a yellow-painted park bench with the inscription ‘Nur für Juden’ – for Jews only – and felt a sudden stab of longing. He thought of his friends at the Waisenhaus, of Heinz Nadel and Fräulein
Merz, but somehow couldn’t quite get his mind to imagine anything dreadful happening to them. Two policemen walked past him. One of them stopped and turned.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked sternly.
‘Yes,’ Alfred answered. ‘I’m waiting for my sister.’ He pointed to the shop.
‘Come on, Klaus, the boy’s doing no harm,’ the other policeman said. ‘It’s bloody freezing out here.’
The first policeman hesitated.
Smile, Alfred. Don’t let them think you’re up to no good.
Alfred attempted a polite smile. The policeman barked a ‘Heil Hitler’ and re-joined his colleague.
A moment later, Johanna hurried out of the shop. ‘What did they want?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Nothing. Just asked if everything was all right.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s get home,’ she said, looking back over her shoulder briefly.
‘Are you in trouble?’ Alfred asked with a grin.
‘Don’t be smart!’ she said, her voice raised.
She said nothing more about the matter until later that night, when she was placing a hot stone under his blanket to warm his bed.
‘I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier,’ she said, as he crawled into bed, relishing the warmth of the stone against his toes. ‘I suppose you’re old enough to know.’
Alfred yawned. ‘Know what?’ he asked.
Johanna looked down at her hands; her skin was red and coarse, and she had bitten her nails down to the quick. ‘Frau von Markstein needs to take a special kind of medicine.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Or rather, she would get very sick if she didn’t take her medicine. Oh, Alfred, I don’t know how to explain!’ She got up, walked to the window, and then came and sat back down on his bed. ‘Franziska is a morphine addict. Do you know what that means?’
Alfred nodded slowly, although he only half understood.
‘But morphine is illegal, so it’s very difficult to come by. I – ’ she squeezed her hands together, ‘I get it from the apothecary at Bayerischer Platz. That’s what I was doing today, and why I was so worried about the policemen.’
The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days Page 10
