Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

  The salami-eating man had followed her out into the corridor when she went in search of the Ladies. She thought he was going to the buffet car but then as she reached the lavatory compartment he attempted, to her alarm, to push in after her. He said something to her that she didn’t understand, although its meaning seemed lewd (the cigar and the salami seemed strange preludes). ‘Lass mich in Ruhe,’ leave me in peace, she said stoutly but he continued to push her and she continued to push back. She suspected their struggle, polite as opposed to violent, might have looked quite comical to an observer. Ursula wished there was someone in the corridor that she could appeal to. She couldn’t imagine what the man would do to her if he succeeded in confining her in the tiny lavatory compartment. (Afterwards she wondered why she hadn’t simply screamed. What a dunce she was.)

  She was ‘saved’ by a pair of officers, smart in their black uniforms and silver insignia, who materialized out of nowhere and took a firm hold of the man. They gave him a stern talking-to, although she couldn’t recognize half the vocabulary, and then very gallantly they found her a different carriage, one where there were only women, which she hadn’t known about. When the officers had gone her fellow female travellers couldn’t stop talking about how handsome the SS officers were. (‘Schutzstaffel,’ one of the women murmured admiringly. ‘Not like those louts in brown.’)

  The train was late pulling into the station in Munich. There had been some kind of incident, Herr Brenner said, a man had fallen from the train.

  ‘How awful,’ Ursula said.

  Despite it being summer, it was chilly and raining heavily. The gloomy atmosphere didn’t lift with her arrival at the Brenners’ enormous apartment, where no lamps were lit against the evening and where the rain was beating against the lace-curtained windows as if it was determined to break in.

  Between them, Ursula and Herr Brenner had lugged her heavy trunk up the stairs, a somewhat farcical procedure. Surely there was someone who could help them, Ursula thought irritably? Hugh would have employed ‘a man’ – or two – and not expected her to manage it herself. She thought of the SS officers on the train, how efficiently and courteously they would have dealt with the trunk.

  The female Brenners of the house proved to be absent. ‘Oh, not back yet,’ Herr Brenner said, unconcerned. ‘They went shopping, I think.’ The apartment was full of heavy furniture and shabby rugs and leafy plants that gave the impression of a jungle. She shivered, it seemed inhospitably cold for the time of year.

  They manoeuvred the trunk into the room that was to be hers. ‘This used to be my mother’s room,’ Herr Brenner said. ‘This is her furniture. Sadly, she died last year.’ The way that he gazed at the bed – a large, Gothic affair that looked as if it were built specifically to induce nightmares in its occupant – clearly hinted that Frau Brenner senior’s demise had taken place within its downy coverlets. The bed seemed to dominate the room and Ursula felt suddenly nervous. Her experience on the train with the salami-eating man was still embarrassingly vivid and now here she was again alone in a foreign country with a complete stranger. Bridget’s lurid tales of the white slave trade came to mind.

  To her relief, they both heard the front door open and a great commotion taking place in the hallway. ‘Ah,’ Herr Brenner said, beaming with delight, ‘they’re back!’

  The girls spilled and tumbled into the apartment, all wet from the rain, laughing and carrying parcels. ‘Look who’s arrived,’ Herr Brenner said, inducing much excitement in the youngest two girls. (Hilde and Hanne would prove to be the most excitable girls Ursula had ever encountered.)

  ‘You’re here!’ Klara said, clasping both her hands in her own cold, damp ones, ‘Herzlich willkommen in Deutschland.’

  While the younger girls chattered nineteen to the dozen Klara moved quickly round the apartment turning on lamps and the place was suddenly transformed – the rugs were worn but they were figured richly, the old furniture gleamed with polish, the cold jungle of plants turned into a pretty, ferny bower. Herr Brenner lit a big porcelain Kachelofen in the living room (‘like having a big warm animal in the room’, she wrote to Pamela) and assured her that tomorrow the weather would be back to normal, warm and sunny.

  A table was quickly laid with an embroidered cloth and supper produced – a platter of cheese, salami, sliced sausage, salad and a dark bread that smelt of Mrs Glover’s seed cake as well as a delicious kind of fruit soup that confirmed that she was in a foreign country. (‘Cold fruit soup!’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘What would Mrs Glover have to say about that!’)

  Even Herr Brenner’s dead mother’s room was more accommodating now. The bed was soft and inviting, the sheets edged with hand-worked crochet and the bedside lamp had a pretty pink glass shade that cast a warm glow. Someone – Klara, Ursula suspected – had placed a posy of marguerites in a little vase on the dressing table. Ursula was dropping with fatigue by the time she clambered into the bed (it was so high it required a small footstool) and fell gratefully into a deep, dreamless sleep, untroubled by the ghost of the previous occupant.

  ‘But of course you’re going to have some holiday time,’ Frau Brenner said next morning at breakfast (a meal that was oddly similar to supper the night before). Klara was ‘at a bit of a loose end’. She had finished her art course and didn’t know what to do next. She was chafing at the bit to leave home and ‘be an artist’ but ‘not much money in Germany to spare for art’, she grumbled. Klara kept some of her work in her room, big, harsh abstract canvases that seemed at odds with her kind and temperate nature. Ursula couldn’t imagine she would make a living from them. ‘Perhaps I shall have to teach,’ she said miserably.

  ‘Fate worse than death,’ Ursula agreed.

  Klara occasionally did some framing for a photography studio in Schellingstrasse. The daughter of one of Frau Brenner’s acquaintances worked there and had put in a word for her. Klara and the daughter – Eva – had been in kindergarten together. ‘But framing, it’s hardly art, is it?’ Klara said. The photographer – Hoffmann – was the ‘personal photographer’ of the new Chancellor, ‘so I am intimately acquainted with his features’, she said.

  The Brenners didn’t have much money either (Ursula supposed that was why they were renting her a room) and everyone Klara knew was poor, but then in 1933 everyone everywhere was poor.

  Despite the lack of funds Klara was determined that they should make the most of the remainder of the summer. They went to the Carlton Teehaus or Café Heck by the Hofgarten and ate Pfannkuchen and drank Schokolade until they felt sick. They walked for hours in the Englischer Garten and then ate ice-cream or drank beer, their faces pink with the sun. They also spent time boating or swimming with friends of Helmut, Klara’s brother – a revolving carousel of Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards. Helmut himself was in Potsdam, a cadet, a Jungmann at a new kind of military school that the Führer had founded. ‘He’s very keen on the Party,’ Klara said, in English. Her English was quite good and she was enjoying practising with Ursula.

  ‘On parties,’ Ursula corrected her. ‘We would say “he’s very keen on parties”.’ Klara laughed and shook her head, ‘No, no, the Party, the Nazis. Don’t you know that since last month it’s the only one that we’re allowed?’

  ‘When Hitler came to power,’ Pamela wrote didactically to her, ‘he passed the Enabling Act, in Germany it’s called Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich which translates as something like the “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”. That’s a fancy title for the overthrow of democracy.’

  Ursula wrote blithely back, ‘But democracy will right itself as it always does. This too shall pass.’

  ‘Not without help,’ Pamela replied.

  Pamela was a grouch about Germany and was easy to ignore when you could spend long hot afternoons sunbathing with Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards, lolling lazily by the municipal swimming pool or the river. Ursula was taken aback at how these boys were near enough naked with their short
shorts and disconcertingly small swimming trunks. Germans generally, she discovered, were not averse to stripping off in front of others.

  Klara also knew a different, more cerebral set – her friends from art school. They tended to prefer the dark, the smoky interiors of cafés or their own scruffy apartments. They drank and smoked a great deal and spoke a lot about art and politics. (‘So by and large,’ she wrote to Millie, ‘between these two groups of people I am getting an all-round education!’) Klara’s art-school friends were a ragged, dissident bunch who all seemed to dislike Munich, which was a seat of ‘petit-bourgeois provincialism’ apparently, and talked all the time about moving to Berlin. They talked a lot about doing things, she noticed, but actually did very little.

  Klara was in the grip of a different kind of inertia. Her life had ‘stalled’, she was secretly in love with one of her professors from art school, a sculptor, but he was away in the Black Forest on a family holiday. (Reluctantly, she admitted that the ‘family’ was actually his wife and two children.) She was waiting for her life to resolve itself, she said. More prevarication, Ursula thought. Although she was hardly one to talk.

  Ursula was still a virgin, of course, ‘intact’ as Sylvie would have it. Not for any moral reason, simply because she hadn’t yet met anyone that she liked enough. ‘You don’t have to like them,’ Klara laughed.

  ‘Yes, but I want to.’ She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavoury types – the man on the train, the man in the lane – and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn’t read herself. She felt rather stiff and English compared to Klara and her artist friends or the absent Helmut’s confrères (who were actually terrifically well behaved).

  Hanne and Hilde had persuaded Klara and Ursula to accompany them to an event in the local sports stadium. Ursula was under the misapprehension that it was a concert but it turned out to be a rally of Hitler-Jugend. Despite Frau Brenner’s optimism, the BDM had done nothing to counter Hilde and Hanne’s interest in boys.

  To Ursula, these ranks of hearty, healthy boys all looked the same but Hilde and Hanne spent a lot of time animatedly pointing out Helmut’s friends, those same Walters, Werners, Kurts, Heinzes and Gerhards who loafed by the swimming pool in next to nothing. Now, squeezed into their immaculate uniforms (more short shorts), they looked like very fierce and upstanding Boy Scouts.

  There was a lot of marching and singing to a brass band and several speakers who attempted the same declamatory style as the Führer (and failed) and then everyone leapt to their feet and sang ‘Deutschland über alles’. As Ursula didn’t know the words she quietly sang ‘Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken’ to Haydn’s lovely tune, a hymn they had often sung in school assembly. When the singing finished everyone shouted ‘Sieg Heil!’ and saluted and Ursula was almost surprised to find herself joining in. Klara was convulsed with laughter at the sight but nonetheless Ursula noticed she had her arm raised too. ‘I should think so too,’ she said, nonchalantly. ‘I don’t want to be set upon on the way home.’

  No, thank you, Ursula didn’t want to stay home with Vati and Mutti Brenner in hot, dusty Munich so Klara rummaged through her wardrobe and found a navy skirt and white blouse that suited requirements and the group leader, Adelheid, provided a spare khaki battledress jacket. A three-cornered scarf drawn through a braided leather Turk’s-head knot completed the outfit. Ursula thought she looked rather dashing. She found herself regretting never having been a Girl Guide, although she supposed it was about more than just the uniform.

  The upper age limit for the BDM was eighteen so neither Ursula nor Klara was qualified to join, they were ‘old ladies’, alte Damen, according to Hanne. Ursula didn’t think that the troop really needed to be escorted by them as Adelheid was as efficient as a sheepdog with her girls. With her statuesque figure and Nordic blonde plaits she could have passed for a youthful Freyja visiting from Fólkvangr. She was perfect propaganda. At eighteen she would soon be too old for the BDM, what would she do then?

  ‘Why, I will join the National Socialist Women’s League, of course,’ she said. She already wore a small silver swastika pinned to her shapely bosom, the runic symbol of belonging.

  They took a train, their rucksacks stowed on the luggage racks, and by evening they had arrived in a small Alpine village, near to the Austrian border. From the station they marched in formation (singing, naturally) to their Jugendherberge. People stopped to watch them and some clapped appreciatively.

  The dormitory they were allotted was full of two-tier bunks, most of which were already occupied by other girls and they had to squeeze themselves in, sardine fashion. Klara and Ursula elected to share a mattress on the floor.

  They were given supper in the dining room, seated at long trestle tables, served with what turned out to be the standard fare of soup and Knäckebrot with cheese. In the morning they breakfasted on dark bread, cheese and jam and tea or coffee. The clean mountain air made them ravenous and they wolfed down everything in sight.

  The village and its surroundings were idyllic, there was even a small castle that they were allowed to visit. It was cold and dank, full of suits of armour and flags and heraldic shields. It seemed like a very uncomfortable place to live.

  They took long walks around the lake or in the forest and then they hitched lifts back to the youth hostel on farm lorries and hay-carts. One day they hiked all the way along the river to a magnificent waterfall. Klara had brought her sketch-pad with her and her quick, lively little charcoal drawings were much more appealing than her paintings. ‘Ach,’ she said, ‘they’re gemütlich. Cosy little sketches. My friends would laugh.’ The village itself was a sleepy little place where the houses had windows full of geraniums. There was an inn on the river where they drank beer and ate veal and noodles until they thought they would burst. Ursula never mentioned the beer to Sylvie in her letters, she wouldn’t have understood how commonplace it was here. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have approved.

  They were to move on the next day, they would be living ‘under canvas’ for a few days, a big encampment of girls, and Ursula felt sorry to be leaving the village.

  A fair was taking place on their last night there, a combination of an agricultural show and a harvest festival, a lot of it incomprehensible to Ursula. (‘To me too,’ Klara said. ‘I’m a city girl, remember.’) The women all wore local costume and variously garlanded farm animals were paraded around a field and then awarded prizes. Flags, again with swastikas, decorated the field. There was plenty of beer and a brass band played. A big wooden platform had been set up in the middle of the field and, accompanied by an accordion, some boys in Lederhosen gave a demonstration of Schuhplattler, clapping and stamping and slapping their thighs and heels in time to the music.

  Klara scoffed at them but Ursula considered it rather clever. Ursula thought that she would quite like to live in an Alpine village (‘Like Heidi,’ she wrote to Pamela. She wrote less to Pamela as her sister was so aggravated by the new Germany. Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance).

  The accordionist took his place in a band and people began to dance. Ursula was led on to the platform by a succession of terrifically shy farm boys who had an odd clodhopping way of moving around the dance floor which she recognized as the rather awkward 3/4 time of the Schuhplattler. Between the beer and the dancing she began to feel quite light-headed so that she was confused when Klara appeared, dragging by the hand a very handsome man who was clearly not local, saying, ‘Look who I found!’

  ‘Who?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘None other than our cousin’s half-cousin’s cousin once removed,’ Klara said gaily. ‘Or something to that effect. May I present Jürgen Fuchs.’

  ‘Just a half-cousin,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Delighted to meet you I’m sure,’ she said. He clicked his heels and kissed her hand, she was reminded of Prince Charming in Cinderella. ‘It’s the Prussian in me,’ he s
aid and laughed, as did the Brenners. ‘We have no Prussian blood at all,’ Klara said.

  He had a lovely smile, amused and thoughtful at the same time, and extraordinarily blue eyes. He was undoubtedly handsome, rather like Benjamin Cole, except Benjamin was his dark polar opposite, the negative to Jürgen Fuchs’s positive.

  A Todd and a Fuchs – a pair of foxes. Had fate intervened in her life? Dr Kellet might have appreciated the coincidence.

  ‘He is so handsome,’ she wrote to Millie after that encounter. All those awful words used in trashy romances come to mind – heart-stopping, breathtaking. She had read enough of Bridget’s novels on idle wet afternoons to know.

  ‘Love at first sight,’ she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren’t ‘true’ love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness. ‘Folie à deux,’ Millie wrote back. ‘How delicious.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Pamela wrote.

  ‘Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love,’ Sylvie cautioned.

  ‘I am thinking of you, little bear,’ Hugh wrote, ‘so far away from here.’

  When darkness fell there was a torchlit procession through the village and then fireworks from the battlements of the small castle. It was rather thrilling.

  ‘Wunderschön, nicht wahr?’ Adelheid said, her face radiant in the light of the torches.

  Yes, Ursula agreed, it’s lovely.

  August 1939

  DER ZAUBERBERG. THE magic mountain.

  ‘Aaw. Sie ist so niedlich.’ Click, click, click. Eva loved her Rolleiflex. Eva loved Frieda. She is so cute, she said. They were on the enormous terrace of the Berghof, bright with Alpine sun, waiting for lunch to be brought out. It was much nicer to eat out here, al fresco, rather than in the big, gloomy dining room, its massive window full of nothing but mountains. Dictators loved everything to be on a grand scale, even their scenery. Bitte lächeln! Big smile. Frieda obliged. She was an obliging child.