by Sarah Rayne
Later, Silke wrote that she had received a scrawled note from Andreas, although she had no idea how he had been able to get it to her or where he had been when he wrote it. It said he loved her, that he would always love her, and she was to remember all the good things they had shared. She had copied his closing words in her letter to Giselle.
‘I made wrong judgements when I was very young and very impressionable,’ Andreas had written. ‘I was awed and dazzled by people whose motives and beliefs were deeply wrong, by the beckoning dream of a new Germany. And I was swept along by the charisma of a greed-crazed and bigoted leader. I see all that now – now that it’s too late.’
Giselle thought greed-crazed and bigoted were apt words for Adolf Hitler, but she felt cold and sick thinking what would have happened to Silke if anyone had seen those words.
‘They are certainly going to keep me a prisoner for a very long time,’ Andreas wrote. ‘And I think they will probably end in executing me. It’s unlikely I shall find a way to escape, but you can be sure I’ll take any chance I can, and that I’ll try to get to you. But I can’t see how it can happen. I think I will eventually be shot. So, will you do one thing for me, Silke? Will you somehow ensure my music lives after me – that it’s played for people? I believe if death comes, I can face it quite bravely if I know even one piece will survive.’
By this time, tears were pouring down Giselle’s cheeks. This was all the kind of impossibly romantic thing Silke would have wanted, but it was still heartbreaking and tragic, and the waste of it all was hardly bearable.
It was not until over a year after that had happened that Silke met Dietfried, and their engagement was announced. Giselle dared to breathe a sigh of relief. Andreas was probably dead by now, and although Silke might not be wildly in love with the reliable-sounding Dietfried, she would probably be safe.
But sitting in the dark jeep outside the gates of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, her hands bound by steel gyves, Giselle saw with a tumble of confused emotions that Andreas was not dead. He was standing a few yards from here. He was held in a circle of pitiless light, and surrounding him were upwards of a dozen guards, rifles aimed at his head and his heart.
TWELVE
Wewelsburg Castle, cont’d
As the Sachsenhausen officers moved around the helpless Andreas, Giselle felt the tension and the anticipation inside the jeep build. Reinhardt’s expression was unreadable, but once he half turned his head, and she saw his eyes held a dark intensity.
She was trying not to think of the prisoner as Andreas, Silke’s beloved Andreas, because she dared not let Reinhardt realize that she knew him – not only for her own safety, but for Silke’s. Silke was somewhere inside that terrible place as well, and it would be dreadfully easy for the officers to think that if Giselle Klein knew – or even knew of – this traitorous musician, then so might her cousin. Forgive me, Andreas, thought Giselle. I have to behave as if you’re a complete stranger. If I could help you, I would, but I can’t see anything I can do.
The guards were motionless, waiting for the command, but as an officer walked towards Andreas, they came sharply to attention. The officer was carrying something, and as he came into the full glare of the lights, Giselle saw that it was a length of fibrous-looking rope, along with leather straps, and a thick black hook. The hook caught the light, glinting evilly.
Reinhardt said, ‘You understand what’s about to be done?’
‘No.’
‘You will soon see.’
Andreas’s hands were tied behind his back with the leather straps, and the hook was fastened between them – Giselle could not see exactly how it was done, but the rope seemed to now be looped around the hook, and then pulled out to its fullest extent. There was some delay at this point, as if the guards might be making sure the ropes were secure, and then they seemed to be measuring it, and two of them walked to a section of the nearby buildings, as if calculating something. Giselle wanted to shout to them to get on with it, to get it over with, then she wondered if this slowness was deliberate, part of the punishment.
Finally, Andreas was taken across the compound to a gap between two of the buildings. One end of the rope around his wrists was thrown upwards, a little in the manner of a man casting a fishing line, and Giselle, at first puzzled, now saw there was a cross-beam linking the two buildings – a thick section of steel, some eight or nine feet from the ground. It took several attempts for the rope to loop over the beam and hang down on the other side of it, but it was finally managed.
Reinhardt said, ‘They’re about to administer what was once called the strappado. A very old method. I believe it dates to the Spanish Inquisition.’
Giselle had never heard of the strappado, but it was becoming dreadfully clear what was going to happen. Andreas’s hands were still clamped behind his back by the gyves, but the rope attached to the gyves was now being wound firmly around the cross-beam. The guards pulled it until it was taut, then, on a terse command from the officer, they began to haul on it, gradually raising Andreas’s shackled wrists above his head, then continuing until his whole body was lifted from the ground, his arms and shoulders taking the entire weight.
The searchlights fell pitilessly on to him, and he struggled and writhed, kicking out helplessly and uselessly. Several times he cried out, and twice at least Giselle thought he begged them to cut him down. But the minutes stretched out and out and no one in the compound moved or spoke. The only movement was the squirming of the tortured man, and the only sounds were his sobs of agony and his pleas to be freed. He was writhing into impossible, distorted shapes in an attempt to get free or to reduce the dreadful strain on his arms and shoulders. The hard spotlights made of him a grotesque silhouette – a nightmare figure dancing an ugly, misshapen dance on air.
It might have been no more than a few moments – although for Giselle time had become stretched and unreal, so that it could have been hours – that the outline of the figure suddenly seemed to distort, almost as if huge invisible hands had reached down and wrenched the bones out of true. A dreadful cry rent the air, and Giselle shuddered, and looked away.
Reinhardt said, ‘There is almost always dislocation of arms and shoulders. That is what has happened now.’ He paused, then said, very softly, ‘It will put an end to his piano playing – to all his involvement in music of any kind.’
Giselle, still staring resolutely at the jeep’s floor, said, ‘How long—?’
‘Will they leave him there?’ Again there was the disconcerting perception of her thoughts. ‘It depends whether he dies from shock and pain – from the strain on his heart. He’s young and strong, so it could be some while. A day, perhaps longer. But if he’s still alive by dawn they’ll cut him down then.’ He made a curious gesture, as if to repudiate what was happening, and said, tersely, ‘There’s no need for us to stay any longer. The point has been made. Drive.’
The driver nodded an acceptance of the order, and as the jeep was reversed, then driven forward, Giselle thought, in panic, I can’t let them take me back to Wewelsburg yet. I can’t leave Andreas here like this – Silke’s Andreas.
But there was nothing to be done. The jeep was already driving away.
‘And so,’ said Reinhardt, facing Giselle in the stone room, ‘you see what is done to people who defy us.’
Giselle was seated on the bed, rubbing her newly released hands, which were sore and slightly numb. Andreas’s struggling, pain-wracked figure was burned into her mind, but she would not let Reinhardt see how deeply affected she was.
Instead, she said, ‘I’m not defying you. I’m doing my best to do what you want.’ She looked at him very steadily, and saw the light flicker in his eyes. He would like to make love to me now, thought Giselle. Now, here, this very minute, on this bed.
The thought of such intimacy with Reinhardt, while the memory of Andreas’s pain was still so strongly with her was sickening, but she moved to the bed and sat down, curling her legs under her, deliberately
allowing her skirt to fall to one side so her upper legs were uncovered. In a softer voice, she said, ‘There’s one aspect of all this that I don’t understand. Would you explain it to me …? Perhaps if I knew a little more …’
His eyes were still on her body. ‘You are owed no explanation. But ask what you want to know.’
‘I don’t understand why I was chosen for this task,’ said Giselle. ‘Not only a female, but a Jewish female – that’s almost unbelievable. The Führer hates Jews – I suspect he actually fears us. He certainly wants to … to purge the country of all Jewish people, doesn’t he? Three years ago you took all rights from us with your accursed Nuremberg Race Law. So why did you pick a Jew to write this music, this Siegreich?’ Be careful, said a voice in her mind. Let him keep believing you can do it. ‘If I do manage it,’ said Giselle, ‘you’d keep my name out of it, I know that – in fact you’d probably write someone else’s name on the actual music – but you’d still be taking a massive risk. Supposing it came out that a Jewish female had created a gift for the Führer and that you had instigated it? You’d be facing a firing squad.’
‘The choice of a Jewish composer was deliberate,’ said Reinhardt.
‘Deliberate?’
‘After the work is done,’ he said, ‘after the music is completed – a Jew, any Jew, is expendable.’
Expendable. Horror closed down on Giselle and she stared at him. ‘You mean – if I do what you want, once you have the music, you’ll kill me?’
‘We would have to. The truth could never be known.’
After what felt like a long time, Giselle managed to stop shaking and to get into bed and pull the clothes around her.
She had no idea if she would be able to blot out any of what had happened tonight, and although she had not expected to sleep, finally she slipped into an uneasy half-slumber. But Andreas was waiting for her in that sleep; he struggled at the end of the ropes around his wrists, and stared imploringly at her. The lips, bitten through with agony, whispered reproaches. ‘You should have stayed with me … You should have tried to help me … For Silke’s sake, you should have tried …’
Giselle got out of bed, wrapped a blanket round her shoulders, and stood at the window, peering through the night towards Sachsenhausen. Was Andreas still out there? Was it worse to think he was dead than to wonder if he might still be alive, dying in that compound in lonely agony?
The piano mocked her silently from its place against the wall, and she tried not to look at it. She tried not to think about Reinhardt or about Andreas. She tried not to think about anything. It was impossible. Seeing Andreas had taken her mind back to another memory – a recent one of those frantic moments in Silke’s bedroom, when she had realized that the whole family had been taken away by the SS. Almost immediately, she had also realized that the SS were coming back into the house. That was when she had made that panic-stricken search of the bedroom. The topmost layer of her mind had been urging her to find something – anything – that might tell her where Silke had been taken. And so she had; she had found that single scribbled word. Sachsenhausen.
But there had been another layer that was remembering Silke’s liaison with Andreas. She did not think the SS had found out that it was Silke who had been the disgraced musician’s lover, but they had armies of spies, and it was possible that they suspected. If so, they might be about to search the now-empty house for evidence.
It could not be allowed. Andreas was under sentence of death – he was probably already dead – but Silke must not fall into the same fate.
So Giselle had frenziedly torn open cupboards and drawers, aware that the men were already in the gardens, and commands were being shouted.
Please don’t let there be anything here that might lead them to Silke’s love affair, but if there is, please let me find it and get rid of it …
The seconds ticked crazily away, and the SS men were inside the house; they were going through the rooms. In another moment they would come up here …
And then, in the bottom of a small cabinet drawer, there it was. Three or four pages of handwritten music, inside a large envelope. Andreas’s music? What else would it be? But was there anything that could identify him and therefore incriminate Silke?
And there it was, on the very last sheet. At the foot of the page, a slanting hand had written, Silke’s Music, From A. It was as clear as a curse, and it would not take a blazing genius to make the link between this and a German pianist who had betrayed the Nazi cause by falling in love with – by planning to marry – a Jewish girl ‘of so-called good family’.
There was no time to find a better hiding place for the music, and certainly no time to burn, or even tear up, the damning pages. The SS were on the stairs, they were coming along the landing, and in about five seconds they would be in this room. Giselle crammed the pages into her handbag, snapped it shut, and turned as the bedroom door was flung open.
The music was still in her bag now, here in Wewelsburg. She had managed to fold it into the little side compartment alongside a couple of photos of her family and one of Felix’s shop. There had been a cursory search of the bag, but Giselle thought it had only been to make sure she did not have anything that might be used as a weapon. The guards had not found the music, or, if they had, it had not conveyed anything to them. But there was still the possibility that more thorough searches might be made, and if that happened – if the music with that damning dedication, Silke’s Music, From A, was found – it was likely that Silke and probably all her family would die. So the music had better be destroyed. It would not be difficult to do that. Or would it?
Giselle thought about this carefully. There was no conventional lavatory down which she could flush the music – there was only the loathsome commode and the ewer of water. Was there any means of burning the score sheets? She got onto the table to see if she could reach the light bulb in case its heat would scorch the paper, but even standing on tiptoe she was a good two feet short of the bulb. Could she tear the music up and throw the shreds from the windows? But the windows would not open, and the glass was so thick and so laced with lead it was impossible even to crack it. The bizarre thought that if she did tear it into tiny shreds she could eat it, page by page, occurred to her.
She sat down on the bed, her mind churning. If she did not destroy the music and if it were to be found, it would place Silke and her parents in appalling danger. But the image of that struggling, pain-wracked figure at Sachsenhausen earlier tonight was still agonizingly with Giselle, and alongside it were Andreas’s words in his last letter to Silke. ‘If death comes, I can face it quite bravely if I know even one piece will survive,’ he had written. He had wanted Silke to keep his music, and somehow ensure that it lived on. That man who might still be enduring that cruel torment in Sachsenhausen’s grounds, had wanted a fragment of his music to live on. With the thought, Giselle knew she wanted that for him, as well.
The thoughts ran to and fro in her mind, making her head ache. And then, from the confusion and fear, the cobweb thread of an idea began to shape itself. What if the music could be destroyed, but also preserved – but preserved in a form that would ensure no one would realize who its composer really was? What if Andreas’s music could be disguised?
Reinhardt wanted music from Giselle – music for the Nazis. Could she somehow present Andreas’s music to him as just that – as her own composition? It was a terrifying idea, a massive, risky concept to grapple with. And it would mean that if the Führer succeeded in his power-crazed march towards England, Andreas’s music might form the background to a dark and terrible victory. That was a bad thought.
But there was another, far worse thought. If Reinhardt could be believed, by giving the Nazis the music they wanted, Giselle would be signing her own death warrant.
THIRTEEN
Rain swept across Romney Marshes, and small huffs of wind found their way beneath the eaves of Greymarsh House.
Phin and Toby had stacked the attic boxes in a c
orner of the dining room, and had carried Christa’s portrait, the music and Phin’s notes, into Stefan’s study. Toby managed to coax the wood-burning stove into life, and regarded the glowing heat with satisfaction, remarking that it reminded him of a lively ballad called ‘The Fire Ship’. He would make a note of it for their anthology before he forgot it.
‘Splendid old song. Fire ship’s an old naval term for a battered old vessel they would set alight and let loose among enemy ships to cause havoc, did you know that? But in the song, it’s a what-do-you-call it? – a euphemism for a lady who turns out to be a fire ship on her own account, and causes havoc in sailors’ beds. Well, when I say havoc, the poor chaps actually end up having to be treated for syphilis.’ He reached for Phin’s notebook and scribbled the song’s title on a back page. Then, without warning, he said, ‘You hate that music we found, don’t you? You’re hoping it won’t turn out to be the Siegreich.’
Phin thought about saying that if he had been on his own when the attic boxes were investigated, he would have burned every scrap of the music there and then. But he said, ‘If it’s the real Siegreich, that could open up all kinds of unpleasant sections of the past.’
‘About Christa?’
‘About Christa’s family.’
‘Her family?’ said Toby. ‘You think the Siegreich might have come from Stefan’s family?’
‘We found the music in this house. That could argue—’
‘That Stefan was involved with the Nazis? That’s something I’ll never believe. In any case, he’d have been far too young – he was only five or six when the war started. Christa wasn’t very much older – maybe about fifteen.’ He frowned, and said, ‘But—’
‘But how does Stefan come to actually have the music in this house?’ said Phin, as Toby paused. ‘Where did he get it? And why would he bother to bring it to England with him?’
