The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘It’s highly irregular,’ she said, eyeing Franziska crossly. ‘I can’t have my lodgers consorting with one another.’

  ‘Mama,’ Louise pleaded, planting a comforting arm around the dejected sag of her mother’s shoulder. ‘Just think, you’ve brought a young couple together.’

  Frau Wingender smiled tightly.

  ‘And there’s a war on,’ Doris added.

  ‘As if we hadn’t noticed,’ Louise murmured.

  ‘I mean, we must all find our happiness where we can,’ Doris said, ‘that’s all.’

  Herr Fröhlich appeared in the doorway, stepping diffidently into the tableau of women. He wore a dark suit, not his working one, Franziska noticed, and a crisp white shirt. The stiff collar chafed at his neck and he pulled at it uncomfortably. He fingered the brim of his hat.

  ‘Frau Wingender,’ he started.

  The landlady shot him a look of quivering hurt.

  ‘Be assured’, he went on, ‘that I will behave with the utmost propriety. You can depend on it.’

  She relented a little, unable to resist this appeal to her sense of respectability.

  ‘But of course, Herr Fröhlich, I wasn’t suggesting …’ She lapsed into a doleful silence. The last thing she wanted was to lose a steady payer like Herr Fröhlich.

  ‘You be careful, do you hear,’ she admonished Franziska as they turned to leave, with Doris still tinkering with her hat.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she replied, though the words stuck in her throat.

  How strange to be so close to him, her arm entwined around the rough stuff of his suit. Perhaps it was her new dress which seemed cooped up beneath the Poznan coat, but she found it hard to keep step with him. They seemed to move at a different pace. His proximity unnerved her; she had not been this close to a man since her father. Despite his slender frame, Hans felt substantial here beside her, solid and bulky. She stumbled once or twice on the uneven paving stones and felt the pressure of his hand on her elbow. This close she could see the crescent curl of his lashes. The sandy cliff of his brow was steeped in the saucer shadow of his hat. She could almost touch the corn-coloured speckle of his jaw. On his neck there was a red chafe mark from his collar. He had the hands of a musician, broad span, stunted fingers. His smell, like hers, was of Frau Wingender’s coal-tar soap.

  Night in Berlin with Hans was solemn and festive by turns. They strolled down the long placid sweep of Unter den Linden past the frantic clatter of restaurants and hotels, the autumn leaves swirling in cranky eddies at their feet. They halted by the Brandenburg Gate, dwarfed by its vast flinty span and height, gazing up at the winged chariot. Franziska could have sworn the columns were moving towards them, an army on the march like the inevitable progress of war. She shivered and Hans put his arm around her.

  ‘Winter is on its way,’ he said, ‘look how clear everything is.’

  The dark tent of the sky was littered with stars.

  ‘My father knows all their names,’ he said, gazing upwards.

  Franziska looked at him, not the sky. His eager face turned towards the heavens, his breath forming plumes in the chilly air.

  ‘Four years ago he brought us boys out on the roof to see Halley’s Comet.’ He laughed. ‘I was terribly disappointed. I expected something bright and dramatic, and all it was was a shadowy blur. To me.’

  To me, thought Franziska, a comet is a tin lamp.

  ‘But my father told me not to worry. Being the youngest, he said, I had the best chance of being alive to see it when it returns in 1986. Imagine 1986!’

  Franziska looked up at the infinity of stars, as distant and impossible as the numbered future.

  ‘I would be ninety-two years old!’ He laughed again and squeezed his hand in hers. ‘Funny, though, I feel it is a good wish for me from my father, that I would live a long life.’

  ‘Is that why you have not signed up?’

  He looked at her suddenly. An expression of puzzled hurt crossed his face.

  ‘You too,’ he said sadly. He let his arm fall.

  ‘No, I just …’

  ‘I have my dreams,’ he said. ‘And I’m afraid. I don’t want to die. Is that so wrong?’

  Yes, she thought, but only because he had voiced his fear. The naming of it could make it happen. She cast her eyes downwards, afraid suddenly for him. She could not bear to look at him, soft and tender as a boy. This was a secret he should not entrust to anyone.

  ‘When the call comes,’ he said finally, ‘I won’t hesitate.’

  ‘Won’t it all be over soon, anyway?’ she asked. ‘The war?’

  Her voice sounded small in this vast garden of stone. But he had walked on and did not hear her.

  They ambled in silence through the Tiergarten. The street lamps turned the trees into a cabaret of colour, all fiery tresses and brassy crowns, leaves tipped with a viperish gloss. In the distance the golden angel atop the Siegesäule glinted. A fireworks display suddenly lit up the sky, great sprays of pink and silver showering over them. The sudden flowering of the night raised their spirits.

  ‘Come on,’ Hans said, taking her hand, ‘let’s see if we can catch the rest.’

  They took a tram to the Potsdamer Platz where the night-time crowd, usually on the move, a great procession of prostitutes and vendors, shopgirls and clerks and merrymaking soldiers, stood transfixed, gazing upwards at the crackling, illuminated sky. When the last of the fireworks trailed away, they went to the Café Astoria on Potsdamer Straße. Hans chose a table near the window. Its interior was gorgeous as a cake. The iced glaze of the high ceilings was trimmed with painted cornices. The chequered floor underfoot lent a noisy, functional air to the bubbling warmth of the crowd. A carved counter gleamed with copper pumps and the bulbous glow of bottles. High mirrors behind it gave the impression of another café at the other side, a spacious second world inside the first. A strolling band played between the tables, gypsy musicians in red boleros. The three played together, but each seemed in thrall to his instrument. The violinist leaned into his fiddle as if the bow were whispering painful secrets to him, the stout accordionist, tethered to his burden, swayed nautically. The guitarist took up the rear in their procession, strumming floridly and holding the guitar high as if it were a fiery dancing partner. They played waltzes and polkas.

  ‘Oh, this one I know!’ Franziska said.

  Hans clicked his fingers. The band gathered round their table.

  ‘For the lady,’ he said and slipped a coin into the violinist’s hand.

  At first Franziska felt embarrassed, but then she closed her eyes and sank into the music. In her mind’s eye she was no longer in the Café Astoria but at home, dancing in the dark with her Papa, the dust of the yard at their feet as they twirl … and suddenly she’s in the air, his hands an anchor on her wrists, her hair and the trees and the night sky an intoxicating blur …

  The music faded. She opened her eyes. His hand was on hers.

  ‘You were very far away,’ he said.

  He pressed his lips to her fingers.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  She looked away from his tender gaze for fear she might blurt it out. She damped down the urge to confess which his kindliness invited. There was so much he didn’t know, couldn’t know.

  ‘Was it a better place than here?’ he asked.

  She smiled sweetly at him.

  ‘How could it be?’ It was a half-truth.

  She stroked his graven chin. She brushed back the fallen strand of hair that clouded his view and admonished him to silence with a finger to his mouth. She looked at him and saw a child. A mop-topped boy, with an earnest gaze and a future as bright and optimistic as the new century. The river of life had brought Walter back to her.

  WITH THE NEW year came the first rationing, then the war bread, fifty pfennigs for a black, sour-tasting loaf, then the metal shortage. Frau Wingender offered up her prized pair of brass candlesticks for the good of the cause. It was not all privation. In February millions of hogs
were slaughtered to save on feed and Frau Wingender served pork every night for a month. They feasted on fat, even Hans, though Frau Wingender thought it was against his religion. The war dragged on, but Franziska refused to believe that it would ever impinge on Hans and her. If she saw returned soldiers on the street, hobbling on crutches, she would turn away. It was not her war; it couldn’t touch her.

  Their courtship was conducted mostly outside the apartment so as not to aggravate Frau Wingender’s air of grievance. They went ice-skating at the Ice Palais, an open-air rink a tram ride away in Wedding. It was a tennis court in the summer, Hans explained, but with the onset of winter they had flooded it and let Mother Nature do the rest. Franziska ventured out gingerly onto the glacial floor, clutching onto Hans to stay upright. She had a poor sense of balance and the hired boots pinched her feet. She could not quite believe that there was no lake underfoot and that the thin, scraped surface would not crack if she leaned on it too heavily.

  ‘There’s no water under here,’ Hans would say, laughing at her nervousness as skaters whipped and curved around them.

  Hans was steady and graceful on the ice, and when she surrendered to his lead and the foggy band music blaring from the loudspeaker it was a strange sensation, like finding a new element that was neither air nor water. Afterwards, cheeks aglow and ravenously hungry, they had pea soup and sausages at Aschinger’s.

  On Doris’s urging they went to Lunapark, a vast fairground at the end of the Kurfürstendamm. They went on the merry-go-round; riding side by side on painted horses, clutching the barley-twist poles as the carousel turned. They swung high on boats moored only by vast ropes and took a child-sized electric train, which ran on rails through a darkened tunnel where ghosts howled and paper skeletons swung from the rafters. Franziska had her palm read in a canvas booth. The gypsy who held her hand tenderly pronounced her both rare and lucky; she had double lifelines on both palms. The gypsy predicted fame and longevity.

  ‘See!’ said Hans. ‘You and me both!’

  All that spring they spent evenings in Hans’s room – with the door left respectably ajar. From above they could hear the impatient rap of Frau Hackerl’s cane. Franziska often thought of Elsbetha Hackerl overhead, peddling away fiercely, surrounded by her swathes of fabric, the sleeves and pockets and hemlines of strangers, and felt a stinging kind of pity for her closeted life. She, at least, had escaped that. Hans talked of his life at home. His father, lover of the night sky, a timid, hard-working man, nimble-fingered and deferential; his mother, large and blowsy and over-protective, given to easy tears. His four brothers, the two eldest already gone to the front, Ernst who helped his father in the business, Wolfie who worked as a clerk in a grain store. ‘It must be wonderful to live in the countryside,’ he said to her, ‘to be so close to nature. I envy you.’

  She did not have the heart to tell him that for her it was a dark, cruel world dominated by need and the stormy violence of her father’s moods. A mean life eked out scrabbling in the dirt. So she dissembled. Papa became benign in the retelling, a bear of a man, earthy by nature but honest and sweet-tempered. Mother was a loyal, unharried homemaker, broken-hearted by Franziska’s departure. Her sisters she left gathered around the family hearth, happily married and bearing children; Felix, the heir apparent, she sent down the mines, working for the good of the empire. Superstitiously she neglected to mention Walter; there was no need. He was dead. She could say that to herself now without flinching, but she could not say it to anyone else.

  She thought of Hans’s room as a cocoon, a safe place of shadows. Frau Wingender had saved her best pieces for the lodger’s room. An armchair with a buxom rump and a short leg sat grandly in the window bay. A wardrobe, where his Sunday suit hung to attention, a tapestry screen over which he’d slung his greatcoat, an oriental rug, threadbare in places where Hans’s boots were splayed. The small metal fireplace with its empty grate was the only reminder that there was a war on.

  ‘They’ll come for me soon,’ he would say gloomily.

  But she would not hear of such talk.

  ‘No, darling,’ she would answer him, soothing but defiant.

  She practised these terms of endearment, so strange on her tongue. She would sit on the side of his dishevelled bed and he would lie with his head on her lap like a sleepy child. She would part the hairs on the crown of his head.

  ‘No harm can come to you.’

  When the war was over, they would reassure one another, they would go to America together, New York, Chicago, New Orleans. He taught her a few words of English. Mann, Haus, Feuer.

  ‘See,’ he said brightly, ‘they sound the same as German.’

  But to her they sounded as thin and flat as the promise of peace.

  By autumn her world was peopled by women, war widows and wounded men. Even at the factory, the boys who had shared the trolley run with her had disappeared, replaced by a pair of beefy twins from near Poznan. She felt a proprietorial lurch when she heard the name. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask them if they had ever come across her sister, but she checked herself. If they answered her questions they would have questions for her. So she listened quietly as they grumbled about their lot. How marauding German troops had pilfered everything their family had, their meagre crop of potatoes and oats, their only horse. It was the first time Franziska had realised that this war had stretched its tentacles as far as home; as far even as Mother and Felix. A picture of her mother flashed before her, and how she might appear to a raw recruit standing at the door of their kitchen peering into the gloom. There they would find her, sitting vacant-eyed by the stove, wretched with loss, a poor spoil of war. The Poznan twins had been deported for forced labour – they gestured to the rain-soaked yard and the glistening perambulators of death they pushed all day long.

  ‘And you?’ they asked in unison.

  Freckled girls with auburn hair and the same stout legs. Helena and Zofia.

  ‘I have been in Berlin many years,’ Franziska said haughtily. ‘My fiancé is German.’

  ‘Oh,’ the girls mouthed together.

  ‘An arrangement between our families,’ she explained.

  Well, it was almost true. They were as good as engaged.

  The twins oohed again like a pair of frogs. How easy it was to deceive them with their eager eyes and their pudding-bowl hair. They pulled their weight on the trolleys, though. They were as strong as dray horses, hauling across the mud-spattered yard, sloshing through the murky puddles, rain dripping from their noses. Then Helena went missing. She had borrowed matches to light a candle at her lodgings and stuck a spare one in her kerchief for emergencies. The Lady Superintendent had discovered it when she went through her checks at the Shifting House and had marched her off to Herr Lindner’s office. She had been suspended, twenty-eight days without pay.

  ‘These Germans,’ Zofia muttered. ‘Feed off us, then treat us like common criminals.’

  Franziska hushed her. She could no longer afford such mutinous feelings.

  The year turned. One Saturday in late January she met Hans outside Tietz’s. It was late afternoon, a pale and frigid sky labouring with snow-cloud. Franziska stood on the pavement lost in a kind of dream. An eerie sensation of absence would sometimes take hold of her when she was in the city. The largeness of the place, the sweeping expanse of Alexanderplatz, the shuffle and push of pedestrians, the shrill business of trams, the low drone of omnibuses were like some vast engine that did not require her. At first this sense of anonymity had exhilarated her, now it made her feel small and unnecessary.

  Hans, pausing in the entrance amidst the eddy and whirl of the revolving doors, watched her and felt the tender bruise of love. Her small frame cowled in her mother’s coat, the forlorn set of her shoulders, the strange lostness of her. And yet when he embraced her he sensed something in her that would not yield, some fiery reserve she was holding back. It perplexed him. Perhaps it was because she was a Catholic. He felt for an instant the quivering, wounded disa
ppointment of his parents, but he banished it. He was German first, a Jew second. A citizen of the world. He strode towards Franziska and tapped her on the shoulder.

  She jumped, startled, and turned around. Some awful fright registered fleetingly in her pale eyes before she recognised him. He kissed her full on the lips, his tongue insisting on entry. Deep in the ribbed fleshy cave of her mouth, he could dispel the guilty undertow of his feelings and drown the fear of falseness that afflicted him, as if this was some illicit love and he was an impostor.

  She hung onto him, glad of the unexpected fierceness of his embrace.

  ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to wait and see.’

  He took her arm and they hurried along the street, battling against a chill wind.

  ‘Tell me,’ she begged.

  ‘No,’ he insisted jokingly, ‘it wouldn’t be a surprise then.’

  They took a tram, and then another, alighting on the Kurfürstendamm. She loved the way Hans knew his way around; she surrendered happily to his intricate knowledge of routes and timetables. It was as if she was being led blindfold through streets whose names she did not know deep into the knotted core of the city. They halted under a railway bridge as a train thundered overhead.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he commanded. ‘We’re almost there.’

  He guided her towards a door and pushed it open, then they ascended a flight of steps and halted while he knocked on another door.

  ‘Now you can open them,’ he said.

  She found herself in an ill-lit hallway. On a plate below the door’s brass knocker a sign read: Hermann Jünger, Theatrical Photographer.

  ‘We’re going to have our portraits done.’

  Herr Jünger’s studio was a large, dusty room with a raised platform shrouded in red velvet drapes. Around the podium a number of props had been carelessly set down – a sedate tapestry armchair, a small hexagonal cane table, a sagging chaise-longue. In one corner a crop of parasols was stacked, one against the other, their frilled trims like the layers of a child’s petticoat, in another a large wicker basket stood agape, an unruly drooling of clothes issuing from its open jaws. A hatstand sported a rich confection of feathered millinery.