by Sarah Rayne
He glanced at her as if expecting a reaction. Fran said, ‘But – it didn’t?’
‘I found out I had a fairly unspiritual side,’ he said gravely. Fran grinned, and saw that he had relaxed for the first time since he had seen Alraune’s photograph. But then he said, ‘Shall I grate the cheese?’ and she felt the barriers go back into place.
Even so, it was friendly to have him sharing the small task of making the omelettes. Marcus’s forays into the kitchen had been rare, and had usually involved cooking an impossibly elaborate dish, the preparation of which necessitated using every saucepan they possessed and apparently absolved him from washing up afterwards. Michael simply reached for the cheese and got on with it.
‘Lucretia had no patience with men who expected to be waited on,’ he said, apparently picking some of this up. ‘She was quite domesticated as a matter of fact. And she made sure I knew how to cook a reasonable meal. I’ll make you my five-star gourmet Hungarian goulash some evening if you’d like that.’
Francesca had a sudden image of Michael’s flat or his house, which would be warm and comfortable and safe-feeling, and of the two of them eating goulash and drinking wine at a small dining-table. She discovered she was smiling at the prospect, so in case he got the wrong idea, she said, ‘I’d have to say that the words domesticated and Lucretia von Wolff don’t seem to belong in the same sentence.’
He smiled properly this time. ‘Her real name was Alice Wilson, and she had been a servant in a big house in Vienna until the late nineteen-twenties.’
Francesca finished beating the eggs and poured them into the omelette pan. ‘Not kidnapped Russian royalty or the heiress to a Carpathian castle, after all?’
‘Nowhere near. A perfectly ordinary background in fact.’ He passed the little heap of grated cheese to her. ‘Would you like me to open that bottle of wine?’
‘Yes, please.’ She handed him the corkscrew and reached for two wine-glasses. They might as well use the expensive ones Trixie had brought back from one of her walking holidays; perhaps Bohemian crystal would lend an air of grandeur to the very ordinary meal and the even more ordinary bottle of supermarket plonk. This discussion of resurrected legends and ghost-children ought to be given at least a smidgeon of ceremony and be dignified by a touch of class. And Michael Sallis was somehow a person with whom you associated more than just a touch of class.
She tipped the grated cheese on to the just-setting eggs, and said, ‘It’s a remarkable thing, but ever since I heard about the Ashwood murders from Trixie, one thing seems to have overshadowed all the rest.’
He paused, and then said, very softly, ‘Alraune.’
‘Yes.’ Fran determinedly avoided looking towards the curtained windows which hid the dark whispering night. ‘Alraune seems to overshadow everything.’
‘That,’ said Michael, looking at her very intently, ‘is exactly what Alice said to me on the night before my seventeenth birthday. The night when she finally told me the truth about Alraune.’
One of the things Michael had loved about growing up in the Lincolnshire house had been listening to Alice’s stories about her past.
She had unfolded the stories bit by bit, as if she understood that he wanted to absorb the details gradually, and she told a story as his mother used to; making it vivid and exciting and real. Most of the time she had talked to him as if he were already grown-up, although he had always known there were parts of her life she had not told, and that she might never tell.
But on the night before his seventeenth birthday – the night she talked to him about Alraune – she did not make a story of it; she talked plainly and rather flatly, and several times Michael thought she was going to stop partway through and not go on. And if she does that, I’ll never know.
‘Alraune’s birth seemed to overshadow everything else that had ever happened to me,’ she had said in the firelit room that night, seated in her usual chair, Michael in his familiar inglenook seat.
Alraune…The name whispered around the warm safe room like a cold sighing voice. Like something sobbing inside a bitter night-wind, or like brittle goblin-fingers scratching out childish letters on a window-pane in the dark…
‘Alraune was bad,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t just mean dishonest or selfish or bad-tempered. I mean truly bad. Cruel. It’s as if – oh, as if Nature occasionally gets things a bit twisted and lets loose something wicked on the world.’
Something wicked…Michael shivered, and edged nearer to the fire.
At once Alice said, ‘You should remember, though, that it’s nearly always possible to spot the world’s bad people very easily. And once you have spotted them you’re perfectly safe, because you can give them a wide berth.’
‘It’s as simple as that, is it?’
‘Most of the time. Don’t be cynical, Michael, you’re still too young to be cynical.’
‘Sorry. Tell me about Alraune. You never have done, not properly. Tonight tell me properly.’
She studied him for a moment. ‘What a heart-breaker you’re turning into,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I pity the girls you meet. And don’t grin at me like that, I’m quite well aware of what goes on in the world of teenagers. But I don’t know how much I can tell you about Alraune. Alraune never seemed quite real to me.’
Her eyes had the sad look that Michael hated, and her face, with the framing of white hair, suddenly looked older. Once upon a time her hair had been a deep shiny black, and once upon a time her skin had been smooth and pale, like cream velvet. When she was younger. When she was Lucretia. One day I’ll see if I can find a photo of her as Lucretia, thought Michael. And one day I might be able to find one of the films she made and watch it. Would that be possible? Would she mind?
He said, carefully, ‘Alraune was part of a nightmare – that’s right, isn’t it? You lived inside a nightmare.’
‘That’s sharp of you. Yes, I did.’
‘I know about living nightmares – well, a bit about them.’
‘I know you do. And you shouldn’t have to, not at your age.’
‘It’s all right. I’ve forgotten most of that. So listen, start with the beginning – that was Buchenwald, wasn’t it? – and go on from there. That’s what you always tell me to do with difficult things.’
‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is…’ began Alice.
‘…to have a thankless child. Yes, I know. But I’m not thankless.’
‘You’re disgustingly precocious. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve brought you up all wrong.’
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well, how many other seventeen-year-olds would quote King Lear? Why aren’t you staying out late and getting illegally drunk and listening to too-loud pop music like the rest of your generation?’ She smiled at him.
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I do stay out late sometimes, though.’
‘I’m aware of it,’ she said, dryly.
‘Tell me about Buchenwald. Didn’t you try to escape? I would have done.’
‘At first I thought I would,’ said Alice. ‘I even thought it would be easy. All through that train journey I planned what I would do and how I would get away.’
‘To find Conrad and Deborah.’ This was entirely understandable. ‘So there you were on the train trying to plan an escape.’
‘Not just precocious, persistent as well,’ said Alice. ‘But yes, I was on the train, and I thought about escaping all through the hours and hours of jolting and the biting cold, with people being sick on the wooden floors from terror, or relieving their bladders in front of everyone simply because there was nowhere else to do it. Captivity isn’t romantic or noble, Michael, not like it is in stories. It isn’t the Prisoner of Zenda, or the rightful heir to a kingdom being shut in a stone cell by a usurper and then rescued in a swashbuckling fight. The reality’s squalid and horrible and dehumanizing – the Nazis loved the dehumanizing part, of course; it fitted very neatly with their propaganda and their murderous schemes against the Je
ws. Even so, all through that journey I clung on to how I would find a way to fool them and outwit the SS, and how I would cheat Leo Dreyer and get away—’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No. There were escapes from the camps, of course, and quite a lot of them were from Buchenwald. Towards the end of the war there was an underground resistance network that smuggled people out. But in those early months it was a very difficult camp to escape from.’
‘What made it so difficult?’
Alice paused, as if arranging the memories in her mind. ‘All the concentration camps were dreadful places,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe how dreadful they were. Most of them were death camps – “Rückkehr unerwünscht” they were labelled. That means, “Return not desired”. Death camps, you see. Buchenwald wasn’t that; but it was “Vernichtung durch arbeit”. Extermination by work.’
Again the pause. Then, ‘Originally it was intended for political prisoners,’ she said. ‘So groups of people were taken into nearby factories or quarries in Weimar and Erfurt, and made to work there, sometimes for twelve hours at a time.’
‘Did you have to do that?’
‘Yes, for a while. I hoped I could escape that way, but the guards were with us all the time, and it was impossible. There were roll calls twice a day – sometimes three times – and the SS patrols were everywhere. Anyone caught trying to escape was shot at once.’ She paused again, and then said, ‘To me – to all of us – Buchenwald was an outpost of hell.’
Once the initial shock and the exhaustion of the gruelling journey had worn off a little, the days inside Buchenwald had begun to blur into a sick bleak misery that seemed to have no end. Alice had found this almost more terrifying than anything she had yet experienced, because once you were caught in it you began to lose count of the days, and you stopped caring which day or which month it was anyway. But earlier on she vowed to keep careful count of the days, and she scratched a rough chart on the edge of her wooden-framed bunk so that she could cross off each day and know how much time had passed.
Some of the women with whom she shared the hut – Hut 24 it had been – believed themselves to have died, and to have gone to hell. This was the real hell of the preachers and the rabbis and the priests, they said with fearful eyes. This was the place where you paid for your sins and who knew how long that might take? Alice thought this a naïve outlook, but once or twice she found herself wondering whether there was some form of retribution at work. Supposing this is the reckoning, she thought – the payment for those enchanted ten years? For having Conrad and Deborah, and for all the extravagances and the fun and the admiration.
Supposing that like Faust, I sold my soul to the devil during those nights in Vienna’s Old Quarter, or on any one of the nights since? And supposing the devil has been stalking me ever since, watching his chance to settle the account…? Aha, there’s Alice Wilson, he might have said. I think it’s time to call in the debt on that one. Quite a lot of self-indulgence went on, I see. A great deal of money spent on personal adornment – a good deal of fornication as well – oh, and a bastard child: dear me, she’s had a very good run indeed, this one. A very extravagant ten years. It’s certainly time for the arrogant little sinner to settle my account.
There were forty-five women in Hut 24, all of them sleeping and eating and living in the cramped barrack-like room with the single lavatory and washbasin, and the flimsy wooden-structured bunks for sleeping. As far as Alice could make out, most of them were innocent of any crime other than the crime of being Jewish, although there were one or two whom she would not have cared to meet in a lonely dark alley. Best not forget that Buchenwald, whatever else it might be, had originally been intended for political prisoners. Best, as well, to keep the baroness firmly in the background, and simply be Alice Wilson for the moment. In any case, very few people would have recognized the svelte sleek Lucretia von Wolff in the raggle-taggle creature living in Hut 24 and working in the munitions factory in Weimar each day.
They left for Weimar every morning after the 4 a.m. roll-call, and after the meagre breakfast apportionment of a slice of bread and a tin mug of coffee. Alice hated the dry bread and the watery milkless coffee, but she hated, even more, the factory where they sat at wooden benches, mostly sewing coarse uniform cloth for the German armies.
But surely there would be a way to escape, and surely she would find it and get out, either as Lucretia, or more likely as plain ordinary Alice Wilson, who had been used to hard work and subservience, and to an unobtrusive, unremarkable appearance. Yes, if she got out of here, it would have to be as Alice.
When the prisoners went to Weimar they marched in step, the guards walking alongside the little group. At times, to vary the monotony, Alice thought how Conrad might write music to fit the marching steps of them all. It would be thin, metallic music. Staccato. Clip-clop, tap-tap…Death-by-work…Death-by-work…
Conrad. Was he being forced to work in the same way? Was he allowed music? If they were denying him music – even the tinniest of instruments – he would never survive, for music was his life and his breath and his food, and without it he would succumb to the blackest of black despairs.
He had once said to her that he was a pagan. ‘I worship life and laughter and good wine,’ he had said. ‘And love,’ he had added, his eyes slanting with mischief. ‘I worship love, of course. “Some toward Mecca turn to pray, but I toward thy bed, Yasmin.” You are my Yasmin, Alice.’
‘Rot,’ Alice had said, after she had got over the extravagant romanticism of this sufficiently to remember Conrad’s most recent entanglement with a red-haired Florentine actress from the commedia dell’arte. ‘Utter rubbish. If you worship anything at all, you worship music.’
And so Conrad, who worshipped music, might die if they took that away from him. Alice wondered how she would bear it, and then she wondered whether it would be worse simply to lose him without knowing what his fate had been.
After a few weeks the staccato music of the prisoners’ weary footsteps and the grinding pain of working for twelve hours at a stretch, and being constantly, achingly hungry and thirsty, changed. Now the music drummed out a different rhythm. I-must-get-out…I-will-do-anything…
I will do anything to get out, thought Alice. There is nothing I will not do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
There is nothing I will not do to get out…
But it gradually became clear that escape was impossible; the prisoners were closely guarded, and in the first two weeks of her imprisonment, two young men – Russian Jews – were shot for trying to climb over the electrified fence by night.
Nightmare visions of Conrad, hungry and beaten or lying dead in some wretched unknown grave, haunted her, and to quench them she began to look for SS men who might be open to seduction; when you have been living in hell you will take the devil himself to bed, and although Alice had temporarily abandoned the idea of escape she thought she would not flinch from one or two sessions in the guards’ quarters if it would improve her lot, and that of her companions. Hot water for washing. Better food – or at least more substantial food. Clean clothes occasionally.
I’d do it if I could, she thought. Yes, but how can I exert any kind of seduction technique with my hair chopped short, and the smell of sweat on my skin, and wearing this shapeless half-shirt, half-dress they give the prisoners? But she was prepared to try, even though she was already recognizing the black irony of her situation. Not so long ago my most pressing concerns were whether to enamel my nails silver or scarlet, or the problem of obtaining eyelash-black. Now I’m contemplating going to bed with men who are sadists and torturers and murderers, just to get a few extra slices of bread.
From time to time, news from the outside world reached Buchenwald. Germany was being mobilized for war, although it was being said that Herr Hitler did not really expect to have to fight any kind of war at all. Against this was the fact that Hermann Göering, always the evil genius of the Nazi Party, had lately announced
a fivefold extension of the Luftwaffe.
‘The Third Reich seems somewhat divided,’ observed Alice rather caustically to the others in Hut 24. ‘Or does Göering intend to fight on his own?’
‘I heard there were rumours that Herr Hitler means to annexe Czechoslovakia in the way he annexed Austria,’ said one of the women – Mirka – who was from a village just outside Prague, and who had been raped and beaten on Kristallnacht, before being brought to Buchenwald. ‘But if he does, he will not find it easy. Slovakian people are strong and fearless, and they will defy the Reich armies. They will fight. And our good friends in France will come to our aid,’ said Mirka confidently. ‘You will see.’
The spring buds were just starting to unfurl when the information reached Buchenwald, via a new consignment of prisoners, that Hitler’s armies had marched into Bohemia and Moravia, and that France had done nothing to prevent them. Mirka had sobbed with angry despair that night, muffling the sounds in her pillow, and Alice sat on the side of her bed, trying to comfort her. The two of them had talked softly until dawn, exchanging memories, and Alice thought they had both drawn strength from one another.
Several days afterwards some Czech women were brought to Buchenwald, and they told how the Czechoslovakians had indeed fought the German armies.
‘They fought and they are still defiant,’ said one of them, who had been assigned to Hut 24, and Mirka nodded at this as if she would have expected nothing less. ‘But they are defeated, for all that,’ said the woman. ‘My village was burned to the ground and my family all died.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘I would take on Hitler’s entire army single-handed for what they did,’ she said.
It was shortly after the arrival of the Czech prisoners that Alice’s name was called at the evening roll-call. ‘Prisoner 98907, Wilson, Hut 24?’
‘Here,’ said Alice, managing to speak calmly although her heart had started to race. What have I done? she thought frantically. What do they want me for? But she stepped two paces forward as was the rule, and waited.
