by Holly Müller
‘Play! Play!’ he prompted.
She was too shy to take it; Frau Hillier went with it to the gramophone, which had been retrieved from its hiding place in the cellar. She wound the handle for a while and put it on. Brassy Soviet music filled the room. Meanwhile Dorli arranged herself on one of the empty chairs. The men smiled at her and at Ursula and at the rest of the women but there was no leering or attempt to touch them. They got out a pack of cards and Mama produced the schnapps glasses. Soon drinks had been poured and cans of fish were opened and dished out on to plates. With the music and the clinking of glasses the room gained quite a pleasant atmosphere. Ursula was sure the music was doing her good, healing her like a kind of medicine; it reverberated in the floorboards and at her side Schosi hummed tunelessly and bobbed up and down. The men spoke in Russian amongst themselves but generally made an effort to converse in German. Mama accepted a glass of alcohol. Frau Hillier did likewise. It wasn’t long until Dorli was smiling. The clerk, who was called Pasha, sang and stamped his boot to a particularly rousing section of the music. Ursula began to enjoy herself; it would be wonderful to sleep in a bed tonight. She’d come to dread the cold, quiet haystack and never resting well; her body ached with tiredness and her head longed for a bolster.
‘You like cards?’ said the officer.
‘Oh, why not?’ said Frau Hillier. ‘You have to take fun where you find it these days.’ She looked at Mama. ‘Isn’t that right, Frau Hildesheim?’
Mama smiled slightly and Ursula hoped that they’d soon be friends again – a tension had remained between them since their row about Herr Esterbauer. The Russians dealt amongst the fish bones and tails, and they began a complicated game, which produced some restrained laughter. By the end of the game, the others had had several more glasses of the alcohol and there was quite a bit of chatter. Ursula perched on the arm of Mama’s chair, sipping some schnapps of her own, and watched her sister trying to avoid the glances of the increasingly tipsy officer. At one point, the soldier called Immanuil, a young man with prominent eyes and bad skin, put his arm around Ursula’s waist but the officer instantly became stern, rebuking the soldier in Russian. The arm was withdrawn.
‘No have fear,’ Efim told Ursula.
She tried to relax. But she couldn’t, not entirely. The snaking arm had reminded her that, despite the merriness that now prevailed, something less pleasant awaited. She monitored Immanuil closely; he seemed to be getting drunk. The soldiers who’d attacked them had invariably been drunk. She watched for signs that he might be transforming. At one point a cigar rolled off the table and nearly set light to the rug – Mama dived to retrieve it and there was a black mark where it’d fallen.
‘Sorry,’ said Immanuil. ‘Sorry, Frau.’
Mama laughed and said it was really the least of her worries, and as long as they didn’t burn the house down they could do what they liked.
After a few hours, when most of the alcohol had been consumed, the officer began to mutter restlessly to his companions. The three other soldiers stood and said thank you and could they please have a bed for the night downstairs. Mama went off to fetch blankets from the linen cupboards, and some bolsters. Frau Hillier bundled Schosi off to bed saying she’d see them all in the morning. She gave Dorli a meaningful look before going upstairs. Ursula was nudged painfully in the ribs and told to get to bed. It was past midnight and she was very drowsy, struggling to keep her eyes open.
‘Will she be all right?’ she whispered to Mama as they went together up the stairs.
‘Hush, now,’ said Mama, trying to seem cheerful and unruffled. ‘She’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine tonight. Get some sleep, Schatzi.’
But it wasn’t fine; a while later Immanuil came to Ursula’s bed.
41
The war ended officially in early May, though there wasn’t much sign of it. It felt as though the battle had been lost weeks before. Mama and Frau Hillier prayed that Siegfried’s life had been spared, kneeling together before the crucifix, and Ursula added her own plea for Anton. Dorli’s reaction was euphoric. It was Klaus, Klaus, Klaus each minute of the day as she set about preparing for Herr Oberndorfer’s return, which was downright peculiar in Ursula’s opinion, given the situation. The Russians had moved in the previous week bringing boxes and crates full of personal equipment, clothes, alcohol and food; the bedrooms had been reorganised. Initially, the officer and his men had used Anton’s old room but it wasn’t long until Dorli was poached and installed in the officer’s bed and the men displaced to makeshift quarters on the living-room floor. Ursula slept in with Mama to be out of Immanuil’s way and Frau Hillier and Schosi shared what had been the girls’ bedroom.
Much of Ursula’s time was taken up with trying to avoid Immanuil. Whenever he passed her and there was no one to witness him, he put his hand between her legs. She’d learned to dodge him with an abrupt twist of her body. He stalked her through the house and his heavy breath at her back took on a nightmarish quality, a constant menace and intrusion. She was often too busy to evade him. There were chores to be done and animals to care for and Mama wouldn’t stand for shirking. If ever she left the house for the cowshed, even as she took the first few strides across the yard, she could predict the click of the latch behind as he slipped out to follow. If she was quick she could reach the shed ahead of him, push the door closed and drop the bar from the inside. Safe then until she’d finished her milking. Best of all was if she could bring Schosi with her. Still Immanuil would wait, patient as a hound as she perspired within, other memories filling the cowshed, the hush of the animals mixed with the grunt and rustle of men, their curses and spit and the unclean smell of them amongst the straw. Having Schosi near helped to ease it, restored the tranquillity of the place somewhat, even when Immanuil’s fingers appeared beneath the door, travelled the wood like the ponderous legs of a spider, searching for an entrance, gripping and lifting the cracked and worm-riddled planks, thankfully to no avail. Schosi would point and whisper, ‘Look!’
When she emerged Immanuil would snatch her arm. ‘Come to bed,’ he’d say, and her heart would sink, feeling it was somehow inevitable, remembering his puppyish pleading on that first night, which when she’d ignored it had turned to threats and hands pinning her legs apart. She’d silently borne it. What other way was there? Then she thought of Anton when he’d pushed her into the bed with his hands around her throat. They’d only been children then but both had understood; he throttled her for doing nothing. She fought a little after that, clobbered Immanuil’s shins with the milk churn, making him hop backwards. If there was no way of doing this, if he held her too tightly, burrowing at her private parts, then she had to wait until he released her, his pimpled face flushed, eyes sly. He always did release her – so far – allowed her to walk away, his fists clenched. He was a coward. But if he ever did find his courage, or his chance, she feared he’d use a wire around her neck or some other gruesome thing.
The other two men were no real bother. Pasha liked to lie in the living room, reading a book and picking his nose when he thought he was unobserved. He had a box of fine-looking volumes, some of which were in German. Frau Hillier said this meant they were stolen, which made him a scoundrel. He sometimes read aloud to Ursula and she sat, captivated, not having been read to in this way since Frau Wilhelm had done so in her city flat. She enjoyed the novels best, but she also liked the essays, even the parts she didn’t understand. She enjoyed the shape of the words, lovingly strung together into pleasing garlands of sound, and the serious way Pasha spoke, glancing at her to check she was paying attention. Pasha also befriended Schosi and invited him to smoke each evening in the yard. One day, he presented Schosi with a wristwatch, which delighted him and sealed the bond. Frau Hillier was indignant about the tobacco at first, but she soon saw how much it pleased her son and how he loved to stand with the Russian, his hand thrust in his pocket in imitation of him. They spoke little, but stood under a cloud of exhalations and watched the sky. Schosi seemed
to grow as a direct result of these new freedoms; the sustenance they brought to his soul also nourished his sixteen-year-old body. He became noticeably taller and thicker in the limbs as the weeks went by.
The other soldier was Viktor, a stringent, anxious fellow with a high fluty voice, who hadn’t been here on that first visit and spent much of his time doing army business over the Russian military radio now housed in the shed. He always gripped the mouthpiece very tightly so that his knuckles went white, and Ursula noticed that there was rarely a reply, no sound came from the receiver, apart from a dry hiss. Viktor didn’t speak a lot of German and kept his mouth shut in the evenings, a quiet uneasy presence. Efim had told Dorli that Viktor was shell-shocked. Ursula knew this had something to do with bombs, and that the sheer noise of a blast could send a man out of his mind. He did seem to live in another world. He wandered in the night, dragged the table flush to the wall in the kitchen and sat beneath it till morning. She found him there once when she was the first to come downstairs. He peered from between the table legs, wearing his helmet. He said nothing so she left him alone. Soon after, Efim came to coax him out.
At the farm, Dorli chattered to Ursula about Klaus. She’d beckon her to accompany her on her next task and Ursula would sigh, knowing that she was to be a listening post again. While she helped to clean out the chicken shed, to net the fruit bushes, to knock a wasps’ nest from the cowshed wall, she was subjected to Dorli’s fantasies about married life in the adjacent valley. She supposed her sister was trying to ignore what was happening to her, eyes fixed on the future as though her time in Felddorf was already history, as though everything that occurred here could be erased as easily as the stains made by the officer’s boots on the bed sheets.
‘I’ll have my own house,’ she babbled. ‘And I’ll go every week to church. I’ll have children – two boys and two girls. The eldest will be Klaus, after his papa.’
Ursula swept, sickled, swilled, and made obliging sounds, only partly paying attention to the endless monologue, her mind more inclined to wander to thoughts of Anton or Sepp. She hadn’t seen Sepp for some time and wondered if she’d still find him beautiful and if they’d argue again. The trembling, leaping pleasure – the March hares in her belly – she couldn’t feel that any more. She seemed incapable of longing these days. She felt not quite alive, her flame stamped out. But she remembered it and perhaps an ember survived. She considered what her sister would do: what if she married and Klaus wanted to kiss her and sleep with her? Could she be happy? She thought of her own happiness, her future; there were no painted fences, dumplings bobbing in a pan, a tableful of children, a life of church and pinafores and never telling. Nothing so simple. It refused to take shape, wisp-like, blowing and shifting like flimsy fog dispersing on a field. She could only think as far as Anton’s return, and she clung to the belief that other things would return with him, times gone by, those days when they’d lain in the meadow collecting grass seed to throw into the wind, flown a kite made of one of Mama’s old slips, the string looped around her foot. She closed her eyes and pictured the flash of material against the sun, the tearing flutter of air across silk, June bugs like pieces of chaff striking her head and body. She felt again the heat and drowsiness, barely able to open her eyes against the glare, not worrying at all, stupefied and content.
‘I hope he’s on a train already.’ Dorli paused in her polishing of the farmhouse window. Ursula was inside and her sister out; they’d cracked open the sash to converse while they worked. Dorli inspected herself appraisingly in the glass and attacked snarls in her hair with her fingers. Ursula was invisible to her sister in the dim interior of the kitchen. ‘He’ll be thinking of me, I’m sure,’ she continued. ‘But what will I tell him? What will I say?’
Ursula stopped polishing and wandered away amongst the mess of the kitchen while Dorli talked. The worktops were spotted with mouse droppings, mould grew on dirty crockery in the sink and the basin was splattered with scraped food; a crumpled spider lay drowned near the plughole. Herr Esterbauer didn’t make time for housekeeping now and the stove was so full of clinker it barely burned, coughing faint heat into the room. Ursula opened some of the drawers – cutlery mixed with tools, rags and tea cloths, a whole drawer full of odds and ends, scraps of paper. A small square box in the back corner, its lid covered in ornate carving. She opened it carefully. In it was jewellery: necklaces, rings, earrings, a gold watch for a woman’s wrist, glittering stones, emeralds, diamonds, rubies. Ursula knew Herr Esterbauer’s mother had once been very wealthy: a Prussian aristocrat who’d lost everything after her imprudent marriage to Herr Esterbauer’s father. She lifted a ruby necklace, draped it across her palm. It snaked over her fingers, weighty and smooth, the jewels that hung from the main strand large and gleaming. She tilted it so it caught the light. The glorious depth and darkness of the colour struck her in a deep red place of her own and she felt quite breathless looking at it; vivid light leapt from the gems, brilliant as flame, dancing and licking across the many faces, rich as wine, as blood. She brought the jewels nearer to her eyes, inspecting their clarity; they warmed her, made the ember glow.
‘Fräulein?’ came a voice from the far end of the room beyond the half-wall. She hurriedly replaced the necklace, closed the box, her nerves jangling with guilt. She hadn’t thought to take it, she told herself. She’d only looked. A man stood in the doorway that led to the stairs, a young Russian, slim and with a clean-shaven face, dust-coloured hair and narrow chin. It was the same man who’d offered her money outside the outhouse. He leaned against the doorframe as if he’d been watching for some time, arms crossed, deep-socketed eyes unblinking. ‘You like them?’ he said, with an upward nod. She stared at him for a moment then hurried to the window, collected her polishing cloth and joined her sister outside.
42
The Allied powers divided the country as they saw fit; Russia, America, Britain and France occupied the provinces, the capital carved into four sections like a great Sachertorte. The country’s de-Nazification was to be closely supervised. Winter arrived and clamped grim cold over the land as tight as the lid of a funeral urn. In Lower Austria the Russians stayed and in the Hildesheim house too. Worst luck to be under Soviet rule but there was little to be done about it and the people of Felddorf and the surrounding area plodded onwards, learning as best they could to tolerate the drunken, disorganised Easterners. Ursula grew accustomed to the smell of the protecting mint tea, herrings and tobacco smoke, a pungent blend of odours that filled the house, and to the sound of muddied boots clattering up and down the stairs. She accepted the ever-deepening disapproval in the village, all eyes following once she’d passed so that it felt as though a string of cans was tied to her foot and trailed behind, growing heavier, noisier, and more difficult to drag with each step, collecting whispers and condemnations. She’d even accepted Immanuil’s tireless game, though he came closer and closer to serious violation. He bared his private parts, gripped his peter and shook it. Old resentments against Mama surfaced as Ursula found she was unable to keep him away; when she sat at the table and cringed at the touch of his fingers on her neck and Mama stared into her soup, ignoring what was happening in front of her, long-forgotten feelings rose anew, returned to Ursula from another time when Mama had done nothing to protect them, had invited the beasts inside, allowed the house to become a trap, a place without safety.
She prayed often for Anton, fretted and hoped. If he’d fallen into Russian hands there was no knowing what punishment would be decided. Some were let go with a reprimand, others put to death. She stopped often at holy shrines to light candles. She developed superstitions. If she could carry her washbowl down to the scullery without spilling a drop then he’d be saved; if she could leave one potato uneaten despite her hunger, or find a face in the clouds and point it out to Schosi, then Anton wasn’t dead or on his way to the East, a prisoner in rags, but near by and thinking of her. She waited for another letter but none came. She tried to take the adv
ice that Frau Hillier gave to Mama about Siegfried.
‘It’s best to ready yourself,’ she counselled. ‘Don’t make it harder by wishing.’ Mama grew stiff-faced at this and the two women bickered, Mama unable to bear Frau Hillier’s pragmatism, her capability, how vital she’d become. Frau Hillier had developed a kind of matronly authority with Efim and his men. She enlisted Pasha and Viktor in household tasks, sent Immanuil on as many errands as possible and told Ursula to keep her eyes peeled when he was due to return. She devised prayers to help them feel less wretched after another radio broadcast about the death camps, all listening in speechless horror to the news – the sheer number of Jews, gypsies and others, the abominable thrift and macabre system of the exterminations – mattresses stuffed with human hair, soap flakes of fat and meticulous removal of gold fillings, awful experiments conducted on children, on the weak. Ursula thought about Schosi and his close escape, of the pleading message pencilled in the Hartburg corridor. Frau Hillier spoke about inhumanity and godlessness and the need to now make amends, to do God’s work, to bring hope again to the Austria she’d known and loved, to tolerate no more of this vile cannibalism. They must think of the future. Her presence was a warming fire around which all could gather and for a moment heat their hands and ease their conscience. In comparison, Mama was unneeded, dependent and inept in her own home; she commented sourly on the one subject that would hurt her friend:
