Her voice fell to a whisper. “A wonderful child. A wonderful girl, our Lilli. Right from the start.”
She looked long at her husband and took his hand.
“He helped me,” she said. “We looked after the baby, we looked after Hanna. You helped me.”
They smiled at one another through tears, and they held hands.
“When it was finally over,” she continued, “Hanna fell back into a deep sleep. She was fine physically, but she slept and slept as if she hadn’t slept for weeks—for a day, a night, and another day. I can’t remember exactly. And there we were with her daughter and no idea what to do.”
She reached for her glass and closed her eyes, unable to say any more. Her husband saw it and took over.
“Gertrud came. She brought baby food, clothes, diapers—everything you need. I phoned her and she came immediately. She looked at Hanna, she looked at the baby, she picked the baby up. It was as though she had always had her. They fit so well together. I can’t say it any other way. They fit so well together.” He fell silent, a sad smile on his face. “It made her happy to be holding that baby. Yes, she suddenly looked . . . at peace, full of clarity, full of certainty. Like she never had been before. And the baby was also calm.”
“What about Hanna?”
They looked at one another in silence.
“Hanna went to pieces,” Dorothee Brendler finally said, quietly. “She couldn’t find a way back into her life.”
She recalled how Hanna awoke from her exhaustion and fell into an even deeper one. The images rose up in her mind.
Hanna had been away too long, been on the move too long. Too much had happened; she couldn’t fit back into her old life.
“It’s just a matter of getting used to things,” her parents had said in the beginning, when they laid her daughter down with her. She’d looked at her with distant eyes and said, “Take her away! What am I supposed to do with her?” and pushed her away. The baby began to cry. Gertrud picked her up, and she became calm.
Dorothee and Hans stroked her hair gently, looked at one another, looked at Gertrud rocking the baby, began to wonder . . .
Two days went by.
“We have to register the birth,” Dorothee said one morning as they were sitting to breakfast. The baby was asleep in her crib in Gertrud’s room. “It’s unforgivable that we haven’t done it yet. Too much time has already gone by.”
Gertrud suddenly said, “I want her.”
Dorothee stared at her daughter. Her husband gathered himself first. “What? What do you mean?”
“I want her,” Gertrud said again. “I want Hanna’s baby. I’ll be the best mother she could have, you know that. Hanna doesn’t even want the baby. Just look at her. She belongs in the nuthouse. She’s not in any position to look after her child. She starts to cry when she’s anywhere near her. I want her. Give her to me. Let me have her. You owe it to me.” She looked at her father. “You owe it to me.”
They held their breath. Dorothee eventually said, “No, Gertrud, stop it! It’s crazy.”
But Gertrud didn’t stop. She talked and talked, as if trying to get her childhood, her youth, out of her system. She had always been second best, always the loser, always in the shadows, burned, exiled.
“The way you looked at her! I hated it! You never looked at me like that. Never looked at me with that warmth, that sense of wonder, that enthusiasm. She was your daughter. Not me. She’s always been the one, your daughter, in your heart.”
It all fell apart in that moment. Dorothee felt it and could do nothing. Hans shook his head. “No, Gertrud, no! You’re both my daughters, I love you both.”
But Gertrud shook her head, sure of what she was saying. She clearly felt she was right.
“She was more your daughter,” she said. “She was always more.”
He moved to stand and go to her, to take her in his arms, but she stretched out her hands defensively, an impenetrable wall.
“No,” she said. “I don’t need it now. It’s much too late. Give Lilli to me!”
She sprang up, ran upstairs to her room, picked up the baby—who was jolted awake but soon pacified—took her into Hanna’s room, and sat on her bed, waiting.
“What’s going on, Gertrud?” Dorothee had followed with her husband. “This is madness! What do you intend to do?”
“Wait,” Gertrud said. She rocked the baby in her arms, listened to her making little sucking noises before falling back to sleep. “Wait for Hanna to wake up. I’ve done it before. Waited a whole night long.”
They didn’t have to wait long. It wasn’t a whole night this time.
As if Hanna sensed a threat, she started awake, looked into Gertrud’s stony face, and saw the little girl peacefully asleep in her arms.
“What,” she stammered. “What . . .”
“Nothing,” Gertrud said. “Nothing’s happened, don’t worry. Will you give her to me? Will you give me your daughter? Forever. So I can look after her. So I can be her mother. Will you do that?”
Hanna swallowed, leaned back slowly into the pillow, looked around. Dorothee was standing at the window, her back turned, and Hans was sitting at the little table by the door, his head in his hands.
“What,” Hanna stammered again. “Why . . . ?”
“Because you won’t be able to cope. Because Lilli’s afraid of you. Because you’re afraid of Lilli.”
“Lilli?”
She had already called her Lilli. The baby already had a name.
“Yes, Lilli. That’s what you wanted, too.”
It all seemed so clear. So simple. So black and white. So heaven or hell. And Hanna was so tired.
“Give Lilli to me,” Gertrud said again, her voice cutting the air like a knife, slicing through Hanna’s thoughts, through her heart. Gertrud’s voice brooked no argument; it had to be obeyed, simply had to.
Hanna’s gaze roamed the room beseechingly, but found no source of help, as the others there were equally despairing and had no more idea of what to do than she had.
Hanna stretched out a cautious hand toward the tiny bundle in Gertrud’s arms. She carefully stroked her finger over the baby’s silky soft cheek, felt a warmth, felt for the first time a sudden joy tinged with pain, felt tears spring to her eyes, run hotly down her cheeks, felt as though she were seeing the child for the first time, feeling her only now, in the moment when she had to make her decision. “Let her touch me,” she whispered. “Let her feel me.”
Gertrud hesitated, but she finally laid the baby in Hanna’s arms, and as if the little girl sensed the change, or was having a bad dream, she started awake and let out a small, angry cry. Hanna jumped. Lilli, she thought, Lilli has decided. Lilli’s afraid of me and yes, it’s true, I’m afraid of Lilli. Then that’s how it’s meant to be. Let Gertrud have her.
She nodded. “Take her,” she whispered. “Take her! She belongs to you. I don’t want her.”
Gertrud closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded as though she’d been holding her breath for hours. “Thank you, Hanna. I promise . . .”
She broke off, hugged Lilli to her fast-thumping heart, and swallowed. “Go back to Munich, Hanna, finish your studies and then go back out into the world and take your photos. That’s what you always wanted to do. Take photos. Be free. You’re free again now. Free.”
She left. She paused briefly in the doorway and looked at her father, who was slumped in the chair. “I’m sure our father will pay for it all for you,” she said. “Our father . . .”
Maybe she wanted to sound scornful, but there was only sadness in her voice, and since she heard it herself and it brought on tears, she hurried out.
Dorothee eventually broke free from her daze and rushed over to Hanna. “Hanna, wake up. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
But Hanna had turned away. “Leave me in peace!”
They heard Gertrud’s car drive away.
There was a note on the table downstairs. You are witnesse
s. She gave her to me. And it all fell apart. Dorothee felt it. There was nothing anyone could do.
64
I gave birth to a child. Her smile burned itself into my heart, into my soul, and I carried it with me. Her heartbeats tapped against my skin, as did her little feet, her hands. She loved me. She was one with me, but I . . . I sold her.
65
“What happened after that?” Franza asked.
Brendler shrugged.
“It was simpler than you’d think,” he said tiredly. “We would have done anything to make the two of them see reason. But there was nothing we could do. Hanna refused to look at or touch the baby, and Gertrud . . . Gertrud wouldn’t let her out of her arms.”
“But Hanna was ill,” Franza broke in. “In her condition she wasn’t fit to make a decision!”
“Yes,” Brendler said coolly, “you’re right. But doesn’t that justify Gertrud’s argument?”
Franza shook her head in stunned amazement.
“Anyway,” Dorothee said, “anyway. That’s how it was. An unfortunate chain of events. So as a doctor, I signed the birth certificate. My husband looked after all the other official matters: he knew the right people, the right places. They congratulated him on becoming a grandfather. No one noticed anything strange. No one asked. Why would they?”
She looked at her husband, lost herself a little in his eyes—they, at least, had never fully lost their ability to calm her.
“No, it didn’t strike anyone as unusual,” Dorothee continued. “We didn’t have a wide circle of friends, and Gertrud had been in Munich for a long while. She quickly sorted everything out there and looked for an apartment here. She took the first thing she found and moved in with the baby. With her baby. To all the world, it was her baby. Her daughter, Lilli. Father unknown.”
Silence. It was monstrous.
“What about Hanna?” Franza finally asked.
“Hanna was ill for a long time,” Hans Brendler said. “She couldn’t have taken care of a child. She needed caring for herself. A friend of my wife’s, a psychiatrist, gave us a lot of support. But the matter of the baby was never discussed, we never told her doctor about it, and Hanna . . . we never talked to her about it either.”
“What about when Gertrud came to visit with Lilli?”
A brief pause. “Gertrud didn’t come to visit at all. Hanna never saw Lilli again. It was only once Hanna was well again and had finally left that Gertrud gradually reestablished contact with us.”
Franza nodded. Families, she thought. A haven of happiness.
“For how long was Hanna ill?”
“A long time. More than a year. Does someone with an illness like that ever really get better?”
They need that question, that justification, Franza thought. They need it to excuse what they did.
“What about Christian?” Herz asked. “Does he know?”
They both shook their heads.
“No,” Hans Brendler said. “No one ever found out. Gertrud met Christian when Lilli was twelve, and Christian and Lilli took to one another from the start. She couldn’t have had a better father, our Lilli.”
“Yes, Christian was a stroke of luck,” Dorothee added. “For Gertrud, for Lilli, and for us, too. When they got married, we gave them this house. And we were a family again. And then when Moritz finally arrived . . .” She paused to think. “But we were always fooling ourselves. It was a great bluff. An illusion.”
And Lilli sensed it, Franza thought. The bluff, the illusion. “Didn’t you ever think of Hanna? What you had done to her?”
Dorothee raised her head and looked up into the foliage of the damson tree. “We never stopped thinking of Hanna. Never. She’s always on our minds. Every time I look at Lilli.”
“It was like being between a rock and a hard place,” Hans Brendler said. “I knew I’d lose one of them. And the way things were at that moment, it had to be Hanna. There was no other way.”
His voice cracked.
“And it was definitely the best thing for Lilli,” Dorothee said. “She had a wonderful mother. Hanna could never . . . never have managed that.”
That too, Franza thought. You have to think like that to justify yourselves. Perhaps it was even true. She thought of what Lilli had told her. Perhaps it wasn’t true.
“What happened with Hanna after that?”
Dorothee cleared her throat and began to speak.
“Hanna couldn’t get herself right. She just lay in bed, never got up, didn’t eat, didn’t drink. She said she knew that sadness wasn’t good, and she felt safer staying where she was. Everything had to be manageable, easy, according to a plan.”
She insisted she wasn’t sad, only tired. She didn’t know why, but the tiredness had burned into her soul and it was incredibly difficult to shake off. But she assured them she would be all right, and that they shouldn’t keep watching over her and worrying about her. She’d be back to her old self soon and would put it all behind her.
“She couldn’t be bothered with cleanliness anymore,” Dorothee said. “Whenever I cleaned the house she said I had no imagination and insisted that the true shapes of things showed through from under dust. And she’d tell us we had to look reality in the eye. You had to face up to misfortune, that was what counted. I said, ‘No, Hanna, the will to seek happiness is more important.’ But Hanna asked me what happiness really was, what I thought it meant, and said that you couldn’t force happiness.
“To all intents and purposes, her room became an island. It was as though she had formed it around herself in layers, and eventually she placed an old doll from her childhood on her bed so that no one would desecrate it.”
Her attempts to write cards, letters to friends from her old life, all failed. She made do with a signature on a blank sheet of paper. Just letting them know I still exist, she would say. That’s enough.
She must always have held on to the feeling that she could continue, get out, into wide-open space, onto endless streets. It’s tearing me apart! she would say, fighting for breath. I’m cracking up.
She took country drives in Dorothee’s or Hans’s car. She hungered for people, faces, life, because she couldn’t face her own loneliness. Above all she hungered for freedom and hoped to regain it with wild breakneck drives along country roads. If a deer had jumped out onto the road, they would both have been killed.
She hardly spoke, merely sat or lay there, looking inside herself, seeing nothing around her. Sometimes she murmured what sounded like names, quietly, unintelligibly. Her life had not gone as it should have. The realization was bitter, and there was no way back. But where would that life have led? To a freedom that existed only to be given up, to the knowledge that freedom was not possible, that all the time, everywhere, there was so much to lose. She never asked about the baby.
“She finally returned to her life after more than a year,” Dorothee said softly. “By then, it was more than we’d expected or hoped for.”
It was January. Early-morning mist had risen from the meadows, froze, and made the streets and sidewalks slippery and impassable. The fog spread through the forest and the meadows, a greedy white animal. Hanna had walked through the trees and noticed how the fog swallowed her up. It made her feel really light, so light—like a cloud, a feather, white, downy, gently floating—moving onward and upward. Onward and upward.
And then she turned around. Allowed herself to be spat out from the fog, with its white light that left her dazzled.
Allowed herself to be spat out, looking into bright eyes with her own bright eyes and, suddenly, she knew herself again.
“Yes,” Dorothee said, “it was amazing. We were so happy. Then she went away. As Gertrud had told her to. Back to Munich. To continue her studies. At first we tried to keep up the contact. I called her regularly, but either she didn’t answer or she was on the phone so briefly it was embarrassing. I eventually stopped phoning, asking her how things were going, inviting her here. I believe she preferred it.”
She picked up the glass and drained it. “Perhaps we reminded her too much of Lilli. Although she never asked after her. Never. And to be honest, I was relieved that she didn’t. I was terrified that she’d ask.” She fell silent.
“We didn’t see her after that,” Brendler said. “Only sometimes in the papers. Once we went to one of her exhibitions. One of the first. Waiting Halls, it was called, I think. We saw her there, our Hanna, in those pictures. The way she was when she returned to us, her restlessness, her loneliness, her sadness. So that’s what she’d been working up to all that time. Wonderful pictures.”
Silence. They’d said all there was to say. Almost.
“Why didn’t you go down the official route?” Franza asked. “You of all people—you’re a lawyer! It would have been easy to initiate an adoption case.”
They shrugged, shook their heads.
“It wouldn’t have worked. It would have taken too long. You can’t imagine—it . . . it was such a tense situation, so horrible. We were completely detached, like on an island. We couldn’t wait. Gertrud couldn’t wait. And what if Hanna had changed her mind? What then?”
“Fine,” Franza said and rose. She didn’t want to hear any more. It was late morning. The photos would be shown again on the midday news. The one of Hanna and the one of Tonio Whatever-his-name-was.
“We’ve still found no trace of her,” Herz said. “And you know yourself that she had the best possible motive.”
“It wasn’t her,” Dorothee said. “I’d know if it were.”
“Really?” Herz said, unable to keep the light note of irony from his voice. “You would?”
She looked at him wordlessly.
“What about Lilli?” Franza asked. “What will you tell Lilli?”
“Lilli?”
Dorothee and Hans looked at one another, shocked. They hadn’t thought of Lilli.
“She knows, by the way,” Franza said. “I think she knows that Gertrud wasn’t her natural mother. She suggested as much, but I didn’t get it. And now . . .”
Raven Sisters (Franza Oberwieser Book 2) Page 23
