Roots of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘We look after our own,’ said Ilena, and the others nodded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  We look after our own…

  With the women’s help Alice recovered from the physical effects of the rape, and was pulled down into the grinding routine of Auschwitz.

  ‘Terrible,’ Ilena said. ‘Inhuman. When the history of these years is written, it will be Auschwitz that will bear most of the shame.’

  Alice stored the few belongings she had been able to bring with her beneath the narrow bed in the hut which was already becoming familiar. This, then, was her home. No worse than Buchenwald, really. I shall bear it.

  Her bed was directly beneath one of the windows, and each night the outside shutters were firmly fastened, keeping the prisoners in, and keeping the world out.

  But the shutters over Alice’s bed had a chink on to that lost world. There was a small split at one corner where the wood had warped slightly, and through this Alice could see a little part of the night sky. She could watch the moon wane and become a thin paring of silver, and she could see it swell and grow plump again. Sometimes its light seemed to be unrolling a silver path along which you could walk freely, if only you knew how to reach it. One day I will reach it though.

  As the weeks slid past, and as she watched the moon’s inexorable path, she could think how odd it was that even in this enlightened century, and even in this soulless place, the moon and its phases still ruled a female’s blood. And that there were times when it did not rule it…How many days was it now since that night with Dreyer and the other men? It was difficult to keep track of time in here. But how many weeks had it been?

  Two moons went by with no response from her body. Many explanations for that, though. The poor diet in here, the desolation. Oh, please let it just be that. And keep remembering what Dreyer said to those men. ‘Try not to impregnate the bitch,’ he had said, his eye on fire from the stove’s light. ‘Try not to impregnate…’

  The third moon brought a bout of sickness – several bouts of sickness, and always in the early morning – and also a perceptible swelling and tenderness of her breasts.

  ‘We’ll get you through it, Lu,’ said Ilena, when Alice finally asked for help. ‘I told you, we look after our own in here.’

  ‘The doctors—’

  But Ilena made a face expressive of disgust and loathing at mention of Auschwitz’s doctors. Everyone knew about them, she said derisively, and everyone gave them as wide a berth as possible. You did not have to be in here very long to learn about the infirmary block, and the experiments that were carried out there. The sterilization of men and women. The endurance tests where prisoners were force-fed with salt water and immersed in ice-barrels for six and eight hours at a stretch, in order to simulate conditions that German pilots might have to face in battle.

  Alice asked hesitantly whether someone – the guards? – might not insist that she receive some kind of medical care. Would they perhaps even enforce an abortion? You could not hide a pregnancy, said Alice, and Ilena laughed.

  ‘We can hide anything if we plan it carefully enough. But we do not need to do so. No one will care if you are pregnant. Children are born here sometimes.’

  Alice thought she would sooner trust Ilena’s half-knowledge of medicine, and the collective knowledge of the other women, several of whom had had children of their own, than trust the doctors in Auschwitz’s infirmary blocks. She thought, and hated herself for thinking, that hampered by pregnancy and later by a baby she would have no chance of escaping. But this war could not go on for ever. Auschwitz could not go on for ever. Yes, but what if the Nazis won the war? What then?

  The birth, when it came, came at night and was far worse than she had expected. The months of unremitting toil in the camp, and the sparse, poor-quality food, had taken their toll. There were hours and hours of grinding agony, and alongside the physical pain was the mental anguish of the child’s conception. I will never be able to look on this child with any love, thought Alice.

  And even if it survives, it will never forgive me for bringing it into this dark joyless place.

  Some of the women had managed to secrete a little store of things for the birth. A few teaspoons of brandy, stolen from one of the guards; cotton wool and antiseptic taken from the infirmary during a cleaning session; a bundle of clean cotton rags. Deborah had been born in a Viennese nursing home with every possible luxury to hand, and a distinguished surgeon in attendance. Conrad had shipped in flowers by the cartload and champagne by the bucket, and later he had written that marvellous music for his daughter – Deborah’s Song…And now Deborah’s half-brother or sister would be born on a pile of straw and rags, with no one except a clutch of women in attendance. But this child had been conceived in fear and pain, and now it was being born into a hating world.

  When finally it lay between her thighs, Alice could feel, even before she saw it, that it was small and shrivelled.

  ‘But alive,’ said Ilena. ‘Breathing well.’

  They wrapped the child in a square of blanket, and then Alice felt the small flailing hand against her breasts, and saw the little mouth opening and closing like a bird’s beak.

  ‘You have hardly any milk,’ said Ilena presently.

  ‘That was to be expected.’ To Alice’s horror the thought formed that if the child were to die she would be free to plan an escape, and there would be nothing to remind her of what Leo Dreyer and those others had done to her that night. There was a brief and rather terrible glimpse of herself watching the child grow up, searching its features in the years ahead, praying that it would not resemble the features of the man who had stood by the stove’s glow, watching her being raped. And then had raped her himself…

  And then the child let out a thin mewling cry, and something of the old defiance stirred. Alice was suddenly aware of a fierce protectiveness. She would force this child to survive, she would see it as a symbol of hope. Forgive me, little one, I didn’t mean it about letting you die.

  But her breasts were empty and barren, and the tiny daily allowance of milk for the hut would not be anything like sufficient for such a weakling. Alice looked at Ilena, who was still seated on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Help me,’ she said. ‘There must be something—’

  Ilena said slowly, ‘I think there is one thing you could do. Something I have seen animals do in my village. Not pleasant, but an immediate and immense form of nourishment – it would mean you could feed the child properly. My grandmother used to point it out to us when animals were born. You see how Nature always provides, she used to say.’

  Alice stared at her for a moment, and then quite suddenly her own country upbringing asserted itself, and she understood. Nature provides.

  After a moment she reached down between her thighs, feeling in the bloodied straw that Ilena had spread on the bed. Almost at once her hand closed about the still-warm afterbirth.

  The child would live, even inside a place such as this. Alice would make very sure of it.

  ‘I don’t know it all,’ said Michael, seated opposite to Fran in Trixie’s kitchen, the three-quarters-empty wine bottle still between them. ‘That’s mostly because I don’t think she wanted to tell it all. But over the years I managed to fill in a good many of the gaps. One of the things I do know, though, is that Alraune was born in Auschwitz and that the birth was the result of Lucretia being raped by several Gestapo officers.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said Fran softly, and without thinking put out a hand to him. His hand closed about her fingers, and at once something passed between them. Like an electrical spark, thought Fran. Or like being in the shower when the water suddenly catches a glint of sunshine so that for a couple of seconds you stand inside a rainbow. She withdrew her hand, but the brightness of that moment stayed on the air.

  The dishes were stacked in the sink: Fran supposed they would get washed up at some stage, but for the moment there were more important things to consider. Alraune’s photograph was on the ta
ble where they had left it and she put out a tentative hand to touch the glass covering it. ‘Michael, that is Alraune, isn’t it? I mean – there isn’t likely to be a mistake? The name written on someone else’s photo by mistake or anything like that?’

  ‘No. It’s unquestionably Alraune.’ He had taken an apple from the dish of fruit Fran had put on the table, and was quartering it rather abstractedly. Fran waited and after a moment he said, ‘Alraune was smuggled out of Auschwitz some time during 1943 or 1944. Lucretia fixed that, although I’m not sure how, and after the war she brought Alraune back to England. Later on Alraune got married, although it wasn’t a very happy marriage.’

  Francesca glanced at him, but his eyes had the shuttered look again, so with the air of one concentrating on the nuts and bolts of the situation, she said, ‘If Alraune lived in Austria, Trixie could have found the photograph this summer. She used to go on walking holidays in the long summer holidays, and this year she went to the Austrian Tyrol.’

  Trixie had in fact suggested that Fran went along with her. ‘Good fresh air and lots of brisk, hearty exercise, that’s what you want. It’ll stop you brooding and moping over that rat, Marcus,’ she had said, but Fran had still been in the stage of wanting to brood and mope, and the thought of tramping briskly and heartily all round Austria in Trixie’s undiluted company had been so daunting that she had stayed at home.

  Michael said, ‘Where exactly did Trixie go, d’you know?’

  ‘Not in any detail. But when she got back she talked about staying for a week or two in a place called Klosterneuberg. It’s one of those tiny villages in the Vienna Woods, apparently. There’s a miniature monastery and vines are hung over the doors of inns for the wine festivals, and all the villagers get sloshed on the new harvest. Trixie got to know some of the locals while she was there – she taught modern languages so her German was fluent. She mentioned being invited to some of the local houses for supper.’

  ‘You think she might have come across the photograph then?’

  ‘I think it’s more likely that it came from a bookshop somewhere. Trixie liked foraging in second-hand book-shops – she used to look for stuff that might be useful as translation projects for some of her classes. Boxes of old books and leaflets, or even theatre programmes and playscripts – something a bit out of the normal run of textbooks. She liked old prints and maps as well – she sometimes bought those jumbled-up boxes of stuff at sales on the grounds that ninety-nine per cent would be rubbish, but that there was always that unpredictable one per cent.’

  ‘The wild card,’ said Michael thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes. Alraune’s photograph might have been tucked into one of those boxes – or perhaps in a silver frame that was being sold.’ Francesca looked at the photo again. ‘It’s a face that stays with you, isn’t it? And juxtaposed with the name—’

  ‘Would the name have meant anything to Trixie?’

  ‘It might have done. She might have known about the original book. She might even have chosen her thesis subject because of that photograph,’ said Fran. ‘Put all the elements together, and you’ve got quite a good mix. The whole psychology of what happened at Ashwood Studios – Lucretia and Alraune, and the war and Ewers’ book—’ And the reasons for Lucretia killing two men, said her mind. Oh God, no, I can’t think about that one, not yet.

  Michael said, ‘You didn’t find anything else relating to Lucretia among Trixie’s things?’

  ‘No.’ Fran drained her wine glass and set it down. ‘But I didn’t actually open envelopes or read letters. This was just in a pack of old photographs – it didn’t seem especially private.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Michael – earlier tonight you said that after Alraune came to England there was a marriage.’

  ‘Yes, but it was a very unhappy marriage,’ said Michael. ‘I lived with Alraune until I was eight.’

  Francesca looked at him. ‘Alraune was your mother,’ she said carefully. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Lucretia von Wolff was your grandmother, and Alraune was her daughter. So Alraune must have been your mother.’

  For a moment she thought he was not going to answer and the silence stretched out and threatened to become embarrassing.

  Then he reached for his jacket, which was on the back of the chair, took out his wallet, and opened it to show Fran a small, and quite old, photograph tucked into the front. A man of about twenty-eight, and a woman a little younger. The woman had Michael’s eyes, and she looked as if she was trying not to laugh while the photograph was taken. Her dark hair was slightly wind-blown, and she was leaning happily against the man who had his arm around her shoulders.

  Fran stared at the photograph, and then looked back at Michael. ‘But that’s—’

  Michael said very quietly, ‘It’s a photograph of Alraune. But Alraune wasn’t Lucretia’s daughter, Francesca. Alraune was Lucretia’s son. Alraune was my father.’

  ‘Arranging for the baby to be baptized as Alraune was Leo Dreyer’s cruellest jibe,’ Alice had said on the night she told Michael about Auschwitz. ‘I hadn’t especially thought about baptism or any kind of christening – I was too caught up with making sure the baby survived and that I survived with it.’

  Michael registered that she referred to the child as ‘it’.

  ‘But a week or so after the birth, one of the camp commandants came into our hut, and took the child away to be baptized. There was some diatribe about Jews with the order, of course – they were still trying to maintain the myth that I was Jewish at that time, and one of the subtler tortures they had devised around then was to force Christian baptism on all new-born Jewish children. To a real Jew that would have been torment, of course. But I had no feelings about it.’

  ‘So the baby was given Christian baptism.’

  ‘Yes. And on Leo Dreyer’s instructions – he was Colonel Dreyer by that time – the name given was Alraune.’

  There was no need for Michael to suddenly shiver and to glance uneasily over his shoulder to the partly open door, but he could not help it. At once, Alice said, ‘It’s perfectly all right, Michael, you’re completely safe here.’

  ‘I know. It’s OK. Go on about – about him.’

  About Alraune, said his mind. Alraune. Mandragora officinarum. The strange plant called by the Arabs ‘Satan’s Apple’ considered by the ancients to be a soporofic, but also to excite delirium and madness. Anathema to demons, it was said to shriek when uprooted, but was attributed with aphrodisiacal qualities. When he was fourteen Michael had looked up the word alraune in the local library, and although he had not understood all the references, he had understood enough. At fourteen he had certainly understood about aphrodisiacs.

  ‘I loathed the name, of course,’ said Alice. ‘I knew quite well it was Dreyer’s way of branding the baby – because of the film and because of the stigma attached to the name. Alraune, the evil soulless child born from a bizarre sexual experiment…But when they gave me the birth certificate I just shrugged and looked bored.’

  ‘Lucretia’s shrug.’

  ‘Yes, I was always Lucretia inside Auschwitz. There was no reason to think the birth certificate was anything other than a properly registered document, and that was quite important. Officialdom ruled in Germany: if you didn’t have the right papers you couldn’t work or find anywhere to live or travel. So I thought the name would have to stay until I could reach England and have it legally changed. But I called him Alan – I thought it was sufficiently anonymous.’

  ‘In Pedlar’s Yard he was known to most people as Al.’

  ‘Al.’ She appeared to consider it. ‘It suggests a completely new persona, doesn’t it? Tougher and more masculine.’

  ‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘My mother knew who he was, didn’t she? She knew about Auschwitz.’

  ‘From what you’ve told me about her I think she must have known quite a lot. I used to talk to him about the Vienna years when he was very small – about meeting Conrad – the serving girl and the rich aristocrat. I tried to make it
into a fairy-story for him.’

  ‘My mother knew all that. She told it to me as a fairy-story. But not Auschwitz.’

  ‘I never talked to Alraune about Auschwitz,’ said Alice. ‘But he lived there until he was almost four, and he would have had memories.’

  ‘I think my mother knew about Auschwitz, though. But she used to say there were dark places in the world, and that we would only ever make stories about the good places. The places full of light.’

  ‘When you tell me things like that about her, I regret very much that I didn’t know her,’ said Alice, rather sadly.

  ‘I wish you had known her. She was a bit like you – I don’t mean to look at. But when she talked – she could make you remember that there might be really good things waiting in life ahead of you. She could make you forget the bad things in life.’

  ‘That’s a very good quality to have,’ said Alice at once. ‘I think she’s passed it on to you.’

  ‘Do you? She hadn’t got it full-pelt, turbo-charged, like you have. But it was there.’ A pause. ‘D’you suppose that’s why he married her?’

  ‘Because she reminded him of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m sorry he made her so unhappy, though. I’m sorry she died like that – and I’m more sorry you had to be there when it all happened.’

  ‘She hated him in the end. I hated him as well. The brutality—’

  Speaking very slowly, almost as if she might be fighting some inner battle, Alice said, ‘But you should try to forgive some of what he did, Michael. He was not entirely to blame.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The cruel promise of spring was stirring beyond Auschwitz’s grim gates, and somehow Alraune had survived those first few months.

  But it was as if there was a sullen core of smouldering hatred inside him, and there were times during those months after his birth when the dark eyes seemed to rest on Alice with unchildlike anger. And were they Leo Dreyer’s eyes? Or were they perhaps the eyes of the young officer who had made that faint gesture of apology? There would be a faint far-off comfort to be derived if the young officer could be his father, but could that blue-eyed Saxon have sired this black-visaged scrap of humanity? Please God, don’t let him be Dreyer’s son; please don’t let him grow up to resemble the man I loathe and fear most in all the world!