Solitaire

by Jane Thynne

  She felt her heart lift towards him. The warmth of being with someone who remembered Leo, but who was himself, too. Ned’s lips were moving softly.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Grief melts away. It’s a line from George Herbert. The poet. Grief melts away, Like snow in May, as if there were no such cold thing.’

  Standing there with his arms around her, her body felt insubstantial, her sensations blurring into each other, sight and sound and taste and touch, as though there was no border between them.

  ‘How long are you staying here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m flying to Germany tomorrow morning. I have no other way of getting back to Berlin. Hanna Reitsch is meeting me at the airport.’

  He unlocked their arms, took a step back and regarded her seriously.

  ‘Surely not. Why go back to Berlin? Come with me. I can get you to England from here.’

  To be in England. To forget Germany’s iron skies and secrete herself in the soft folds of the Surrey countryside. To see the red buses sailing the arteries of London, and the Georgian terraces, as russet as a cup of tea. To walk the streets free of hypervigilance and the fear that every wall concealed a threat, every passer-by was a policeman. To escape the sense that numbed her to genuine experience, like a limb that has been anaesthetized. Her entire being yearned for it.

  ‘I have to go back. There are people depending on me there.’

  ‘It’s suicide.’

  ‘Not if I’m careful.’

  Ned took her face in his hands and held her. His voice was thick with emotion.

  ‘If you do get back, to England . . .’

  She looked at him intently.

  ‘You know you have someone to return to.’

  They leaned over the parapet. Far below, a commotion on the dockside caused the miniature figures there to collect and scatter as a limousine, sun glancing from its polished roof, drew up, and two tiny people climbed out. The Duke was wearing a linen suit and sunglasses and the Duchess of Windsor had picked a chic, nautical jacket with navy braiding; an outfit that seemed to say, in her own sartorial semaphore, that having abandoned Europe, her home, her possessions and any hope of a crown, a sense of style was all Wallis Simpson had left.

  As Portuguese police scurried around checking the couple’s hand luggage, a cluster of officials from the British Embassy formed a rough guard of honour and the Duke and Duchess, barely acknowledging their heartfelt farewells, moved smartly past and up the gangplank. A lady-in-waiting followed with a flurry of dogs. On the deck a throng of passengers, impatient after the long delay, were angling for a sight of their fellow travellers, politely shoving and wielding cameras to record the moment for posterity, and Clara wondered if Walter Schellenberg might also be watching, through field glasses perhaps, from his room in the German Embassy, as his troublesome quarry made their escape. Mentally drafting his excuses for the fiasco that would, with luck, have banished the future of Clara Vine entirely from his mind.

  Minutes later the ship sounded its horn, cast off and progressed down the broad mouth of the Tagus to where the sea, struck by the sun, had turned to luminous gold.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The building housing the Berlin Philharmonic on the Bernburger Strasse in Kreuzberg had once been an ice rink and a lingering chill still pervaded its marmoreal halls. The drop in temperature was largely down to the tension between Joseph Goebbels and the orchestra’s chief conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had not only refused to conduct in occupied France, but was also declining any involvement in Goebbels’ latest venture, a propaganda movie to be called Philharmoniker. On top of this, Furtwängler had never joined the Party and insisted on championing Jewish musicians. Generally this level of uncooperative behaviour from a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture would warrant a one-way ticket to a camp, but Furtwängler’s decision to stay in Berlin meant that he enjoyed Hitler’s confidence and that was enough, for now, to keep him on stage before his adoring fans.

  Watching the conductor’s reedy, white-tied figure seized, if not actually transformed, by the Allegro con brio that swelled and died around him, Mary allowed her mind to drift. She was possibly the least musical person on earth and while she adored both jazz and swing, classical music was a foreign language to her and unlike all the other languages she had picked up around the Continent, this one she was never going to speak with confidence. Particularly not here in Germany, where even young children seemed to have a refined musical understanding and were as familiar with Wagner as kids back home were with Walt Disney. Besides, most of Mary’s attention was reserved for the slender man with the particularly upright demeanour who was sitting next to her, apparently lost in the soaring beauty of the symphony. Doktor Franz Engel, of the Charité hospital.

  The brown envelope containing a ticket to a performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony had been slipped under the door of her apartment the previous night. As soon as Mary noticed it she had thrown open the door, searched the stairwell and even run down into the square, but there was no one to be seen on the darkened streets other than a posse of French prisoners of war, working late into the evening digging an air-raid shelter. Whoever left the ticket had evaporated without trace. Instantly she wondered if it was a trap. All kinds of tricks were played on foreign reporters who had aroused the hostility of the regime and there was every possibility that this proposed meeting was a Gestapo ruse to associate Mary with a known subversive, or a way of ensuring that she was absent from her apartment for a guaranteed number of hours. These risks she contemplated for all of two minutes, before concluding what she had known all along: that she was far too curious not to turn up.

  When she arrived in the stalls a fine-featured man in a much-worn suit was waiting in the seat next to her. He was in his forties, she guessed, sitting with his hat on his knee, perusing a copy of that evening’s programme. He glanced up and nodded politely when Mary sat down, as though they were two music lovers who found themselves in adjacent seats quite by chance, yet she knew from the minute inflection of his body and the widening of his eyes behind their horn-rimmed spectacles that this was the same person who had visited her apartment the previous day. They exchanged only courteous greetings until the interval, when Doktor Engel introduced himself casually and suggested a drink.

  He had planned everything, Mary saw. The packed foyer was the perfect location to talk. Men in evening dress jostled alongside bosomy women in low-cut gowns and lorgnettes. No conversation could be heard above the excited babble of several hundred music lovers who were thrilled by the great conductor’s interpretation and wanted to show off their knowledge at length. Exuberance filled the air, as though there was an ecstasy in being released, even for a few hours, from the ugliness and uncertainty around them. For these concert-goers music was a chance to re-immerse themselves in the beauty that had fled their daily lives. Mary, by contrast, was stunned at what Franz Engel had to tell her.

  He found a spot out of the way behind a pillar and leaned casually against the wall.

  ‘Thank you for coming. A mutual friend gave me your name. A neighbour of mine in Winterfeldtstrasse. She said you might be interested in my work with orphans of war.’

  So this was Clara’s doing. And yet, Clara had never mentioned any doctor. Mary scrutinized him afresh. He was good-looking, but so skinny that she longed to give him a good meal.

  ‘I’m sure I would be. Why don’t you tell me?’

  In a low, unhurried voice Engel explained his work with the orphans. The tests he was running and his anxiety about what might happen to those children who failed them.

  ‘I told our mutual friend that I had no idea what happens to these children, but yesterday I discovered something that might explain it.’

  His eyes closed momentarily, whether from emotion or fatigue Mary couldn’t tell, then he carried on.

  ‘I wonder, Miss Harker, if you might have seen those newsreels? The ones about euthanasia. How deformed children are a burden
on the Reich.’

  Mary shuddered. ‘Lebensunwertes Leben. Life Unworthy of Life.’

  ‘Precisely. I don’t know if you’re aware but from last August the Interior Ministry began registering all children with disabilities, requiring us doctors to report all cases of severe malformations, especially of the limbs, head and spine, and paralysis, spasticity and so on. It’s not about mental incapacity. It’s about the degeneration of German genetic material. The cases go before a genetic health court, overseen by a judge and two doctors, and if necessary the children are sent to a special hospital.’

  Engel’s voice was pleasant and calm, as if, like everyone else, the pair of them were debating the virtues of the adagio or the precision of Furtwängler’s interpretation.

  ‘Yesterday, those of us who have been running these tests were told to redirect our results to a new office. It’s run by Professor Max de Crinis and it’s called the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.’

  Mary raised a hand and he paused, understanding that she was memorizing the name although she was not going to risk writing anything down.

  ‘I’m guessing you want me to ask some questions about this institutional care?’

  ‘Our friend said you were good at asking questions.’

  The bell rang and the crowd were finishing their drinks and shouldering their way back through the lobby to their seats.

  ‘This office you mentioned . . .’

  ‘Is at 4, Tiergartenstrasse. I’m not sure what questions you might be able to ask, but I feel certain the answers will lie in that building.’

  In the second half of the concert Engel seemed to withdraw into himself, entirely lost in the slow movement, as though the music had the power to remove him completely from the world around him. Mary knew some artists said that that was their aim, to distract people from the war and all the sacrifices in their lives, but she felt exactly the opposite. Surely art should be about showing people the truth? Perhaps that was why she didn’t have much of a cultural life any more.

  Doktor Engel, though, she liked. When he shook hands and wished her good evening outside the concert hall, it was almost impossible to connect his gentle, courteous manner with the substance of their conversation.

  ‘Did you enjoy it? The concert?’ he asked.

  ‘To tell the truth I found it hard to concentrate. But thank you for inviting me.’

  ‘Furtwängler, though, is sublime, isn’t he?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘He’s an Inner Emigrant.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s what they call those artists who choose to stay in Germany and keep their heads down. There’s a good argument for it. If you leave, what can you know close hand of what goes on? What good is simply watching the fate of your country from the stalls? Isn’t it better to stay and bear witness?’

  It was only after Engel had bid her farewell at the S-Bahn, insisted that she keep the programme and walked off into the gloom, that Mary realized he was talking about himself.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The news was, she was to be sent away. To a facility outside the city where her disability would be properly treated, they would make her leg better and return her to health. The furthest Katerina had ever been from Berlin was on a holiday to Königsberg when she was eight, and that was fun. They had eaten fried fish at a pretty riverside restaurant and rowed boats on the castle lake. The doctors at this clinic were especially skilled, Fräulein Koppel said, and if she was lucky she might end up with true dancer’s legs, twin tanned calves whose sleek muscles bulged when she walked. The leaving date was set for the following week. Frau Schneider had wanted her to go sooner, but Fräulein Koppel protested that Katerina was helpful in quieting younger children and a fresh batch of orphans was due to arrive the next day.

  For a long time after the conversation in the nurses’ office Katerina had sat on her small iron bed in the dormitory and thought about what might happen. She felt strangely dazed. When Fräulein Koppel had said they had tried to contact Sonja, and had even asked the police, her insides turned liquid with dread. If even the police had looked for her without success, what did that mean?

  When she was a little child, her father had often given her sheets of paper covered with numbers. He made them himself. Once you worked out how to connect the numbers to each other a picture would emerge – a cat or a peacock or a flower – all you needed to do, Papi said, was to find the right pattern to connect the dots. That went for a lot of things in life, but with Sonja’s disappearance it was impossible to connect the dots or to see through the confusion to get a true picture. For the first time Katerina allowed herself to imagine that her sister might genuinely not return. Perhaps she was dead. The worry clawed at her mind. Time was running out now and she needed to do everything she could.

  It was hours before the solution came to her. And when it did, it seemed obvious. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

  She waited until the other children had gone into Abendbrot, then clambered across the iron railings at the far end of the garden, letting herself hang for a moment before dropping with a thud on the grass below. She miscalculated the fall slightly, landing more heavily than intended on her bad leg and causing an arrow of pain to lance up through the calf. Getting quickly up she made her way through the streets, along Finckensteinallee and the red-faced barrack block that housed Hitler’s special guard, past the fancy high-gated villas with their Jugendstil decoration, and towards the station.

  The S-Bahn station at Lichterfelde West was, like so many of the stations in Berlin, disguised as something else – in this case the building had the arched windows and bell tower of a Tuscan villa. Katerina went down through the dirty yellow light of the tunnel and waited a few minutes until a train stopped with a sigh of brakes and the doors opened. There were only a few passengers, but being early evening the carriage was filled with the rank breath of a whole day’s commuters threaded through the ashy tang of smoke. The train picked up speed, wheels clacking like knitting needles, looping softly through the late afternoon. It had rained, and an abacus of drops quivered along the outside of the window, until the jerk of movement made them shudder and chased them down. She took a seat, and thought about her sister’s disappearance.

  It didn’t add up.

  Where had Sonja gone, and what was she really doing? Her existence was like that nest of Chinese boxes Papi kept at home, with one inside the other inside the other, so that you never knew when you were reaching the centre. The first black lacquer box had a golden bridge and a weeping willow bending over, then inside was another, with a flock of cranes, and inside that a box painted with a tiny Chinese fisherman beside a ghostly lake. In the centre was the jewellery: strings of pearls that had lost their lustre, chunks of amber like dog’s eyes and Mutti’s ring, dull gold set with shiny topaz like a spoonful of honey. How often had Katerina slid that ring onto her finger in a vain attempt to conjure her mother before letting it slip heavily back into its silent box.

  She wished she had tried harder to insinuate herself into her elder sister’s life. If she had, she might have a better idea where to search for her, but now the trail had gone dead. She wondered what Sonja’s Jewish boyfriend looked like. It seemed impossible to imagine her with one of those sinister figures you saw on the newsreel, with their curved noses, tangled beards and dirty coats.

  As Katerina mused, her hand dropped down and encountered something hard on the seat beside her. A postcard had been stuck between the slats as though someone had positively wanted it to be found. It was a standard tourist postcard of the Brandenburg Gate but on the reverse, where the message should be, there was a single line.

  The Führer murders our sons.

  What did that mean? Whose sons had been murdered? Even with her vivid imagination, Katerina found it impossible to envisage Adolf Hitler as a murderer, armed with a gun or a dagger, creeping into someone’s home. The person who wr
ote it must be deranged. It reminded her of a joke that Sonja had told her once. ‘The child is asked, who is your father? Adolf Hitler. Who is your mother? The German Reich. What do you want to be when you grow up? An orphan.’

  She had never understood how that was supposed to be funny. Surely it should be the precise opposite? After all, Hitler was der Kinderfreund, the Children’s Friend.

  By the time the train pulled into the station, Katerina’s nerves were wound as tight as a music box. She had not dared bring her gas mask, in case it drew attention to her slipping out of the home, so she was praying no policeman would stop and interrogate her. She passed a chestnut seller with his tin cart and brazier trailing an aroma of nuts and burnt sugar, and her stomach clenched. That day had been a two-meal day, so no lunch, and breakfast seemed a long time ago. Reflexively she reached into her pocket. After their conversation the previous day Fräulein Koppel had sought her out, given her a cuddle and quite unexpectedly a bar of Sarotti Schokolade. Katerina couldn’t remember the last time she had had chocolate, but retrieving it now she found the bar had melted in the heat of her pocket and only a sticky liquid remained, leaching out onto the jolly turbanned Moor on the wrapper.

  Fortunately she had brought a few pfennigs so she stopped in a bakery to buy a roll, one of the day-old kind that could be bought without ration coupons. She noted that the shopkeeper did not make the Hitler salute when she came in. According to the book of instructions from the Propaganda Ministry, children were supposed to report any shopkeeper who didn’t salute, but even if she had been inclined to, Katerina had other things on her mind.

  After a fifteen-minute walk she arrived in a square she recognized as Wilhelmplatz, set with tall columns topped by great flat bowls filled with oil that were set on fire for the parades. This place, Papi told her, was the very heart of the German government. Looking around she tried to picture it as a heart, its walls the bleak façades of government buildings and its arteries the broad streets, down which a Mercedes like an ocean liner was just then sailing, two coal-black SS officers in the front seat and a dignitary in the back, trailing a leak of military music in its wake.