The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘You’re a very lucky girl, Fräulein Schanzkowska.’ Dr Spitzer stood with his arms folded, beaming broadly. ‘Saved from the jaws of death.’

  She closed her eyes. Conversation wearied her; she could feel the irresistible pull back into her white world of sleep.

  ‘Now, now, Franziska,’ a female voice admonished, accompanied by a light smack on her cheek. ‘You must listen to Herr Doktor.’

  Franziska opened her eyes to a nurse’s fat lips almost brushing her cheek.

  ‘But’, the doctor went on from his lofty height, ‘we could not save the baby.’

  Baby? She played with the word. Baby.

  ‘The explosion, you remember?’

  The man was clearly mad, Franziska thought. She knew where her baby was. In the river, under the water. Where all lost babies were.

  ‘Walter,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ the nurse agreed sweetly. ‘Walter.’

  ‘It will all come back to you,’ the doctor said, ‘in time.’

  He was right. Bit by bit she remembered and when she didn’t the Wingenders were only too happy to furnish her with details. She had been taken to the Charity Hospital, along with four women from the Danger Building, all of whom had since been discharged. Herr Lindner had taken the full force of the blast. Franziska remembered his hand, his perfect, unbloodied hand. He had literally been blown to pieces. As bad as anything they had seen at the Front, Doris Wingender informed her cheerfully. She remembered the look on his face, as if he had seen right through to the murder in her heart. Another one killed by her careless hand.

  ‘You must put all this behind you,’ Louise said when she came to visit. ‘Pick up the pieces.’

  That was all that was left of her. Pieces. And scars. Wounds on her belly, a dozen or more. A shaved rectangle of hair around her ear where a piece of metal had lodged. A heady sensation of weakness – her legs could barely carry her – and the frightening delicacy of a new-born. I am lucky, she would tell herself, I have survived, mouthing the brisk comfort brandished by Frau Wingender.

  ‘A miracle,’ she declared, ‘nothing less. I’m not religious, mind you, don’t go to church, chapel or meeting, don’t hold with it. But this,’ she said, gazing beatifically at Franziska’s wrapped and scarred body in the bed, ‘this could almost convert me.’ Franziska tried to imagine Frau Wingender throwing herself upon the mercy of a god. Perhaps her god would be different. Franziska’s was a god of vengeance, who ruled in fire and blood.

  Frau Wingender rattled on, her conversation peppered with gossip and hearsay. Fräulein Hackerl was on the breadline, she said, thread could not be got for love nor money. She was doing piecework for the army – gunlock covers and rusk satchels. As for coffee, she said, they’d laugh at you in the Kolonial Stores if you went looking for coffee. Frau Wingender wrinkled her nose. They were using potato filler in the bread. The Engeles downstairs had lost a son. Like Hans, she said, at Verdun. Those Englischer, she said, they chop off the heads of babies, did you know? Brutes, savages. Enough, Franziska thought. Enough. She longed for the timeless drift of the early days in the hospital, those hours of dreamless drowse, barely knowing who she was. How free she had felt. Knowing nobody. Owning no name. Like a pure spirit, all flight and air, swift as a cloud on a blue day.

  June blossomed outside. Her first journey on her feet – a stiff-limbed shuffle leaning on a cane – brought her to the casement. She pushed open the window and looked down. She could smell jasmine and mock orange; the perfume seemed delicately pungent, a feminine assault on the furry, etherised smell of the ward. She peered out of the window gingerly and down below there was a garden, or rather a patch of green with a stone arcade ranged around it and a large apple tree in blossom in the centre. Patients from the male wing were pushed into the sun-trap in the afternoons or, if they were ambulant, they hobbled out to take the sun and to smoke. They were mostly soldiers, young men in half-hearted uniform – a civilian shirt with field-grey pants, sometimes only their hats remained like a cocky reminder. They hunched and lurched on their crutches like thwarted greyhounds, still in twos and foursomes as if they couldn’t lose the habit of drilling. Amputated at knee or thigh, their trouser legs were pinned discreetly in a gruesome show of etiquette. Franziska wondered idly why – as if what wasn’t there must be emphasised. There were shell-shock victims too, with their crazed gaits – some like slippery ice-skaters, others tilted as if battling against an unseen wind. She watched them from above inhaling the petal-laden air. But she did not want to be close to these young men with their hair curling around bandages, and the blunt violence of their lopped-off limbs. They might flirt with the nurses, but they would want to trade stories with her, a fellow casualty of the war. With the windows thrown open their conversation drifted upwards. Even from this distance she could smell defeat amidst the perfume. So she waited until the shadow of the male wing opposite had crept across the quadrangle, plunging it into a grainy shade, before she ventured down to walk alone in the cool cloister.

  The gravity of her illness still hung about her. Because she had lain for weeks shrouded by screens the other patients kept their distance. The crone in the next bed with her pallid complexion and gnarled hands was suffering from tuberculosis, the nurses told her, but she drew up the sheet and turned away if Franziska came near, as if she might be infected with the germ of death. The hours lay heavy on her. Sick time moved more slowly, marked less by the passing of days than by her own unswaddling. Each week a new area was exposed. First her hands, emerging pale and shrivelled and covered in tiny gashes. Then the cummerbund of cotton round her waist, one layer at a time as if she were shedding an outer skin. Her belly and torso were riven with deep gashes, some of which had been stitched, others of which had joined of their own accord.

  ‘You’ll always bear the scars,’ the surgeon told her. ‘But you’re lucky, you heal well.’

  He pressed on the raw tram-track wounds. She winced.

  ‘See how the skin has made a perfect seam,’ he said admiringly of his own handiwork.’

  Nobody mentioned the baby. And Franziska, staring at her ruined stomach, could not believe there had ever been one. Obliterated like the phantom limbs of soldiers, blown clean away. The bandage around her head was the last to go. She felt unblinkered without it, as if only now her mind was free to roam. Images of the blast assailed her unbidden, the deafening roar, the crushing weight of masonry, followed by the sickening silence. Herr Lindner reared up, face agape, the tiny splintering of his spectacles as he fell. She did not want to think of him. He had left a wife and three children, Doris had told her. She covered her mouth with her hand, remembering how he had insisted on examining her teeth. She tried to steer her thoughts towards the future. Where would she go? What would she do?

  The Wingenders came to the rescue.

  ‘You’ll convalesce with us,’ Frau Wingender announced grandly. She was desperate to make up to Franziska, but Franziska knew that she could not afford an extra mouth to feed. The factory would not take her back, and anyway she would not want to return to the scene of her crime. ‘Once we have you home, you’ll be right as rain in no time!’

  Frau Wingender beamed at Dr Spitzer, and pushed Doris forward.

  ‘This is my daughter, by the way!’

  Whereas the hospital had been light and airy, the apartment was sunk into a deeper gloom than when she had left. The war had taken hold of it and laid it bare. Frau Wingender had taken the mirror over the mantel in the girls’ room to the pawnbroker’s on Rosenthaler Straße and the foxed landscape in the lodger’s room (tactfully the Wingenders stopped calling it Hans’s room) had been removed from its frame so the wood could be fed into the kitchen stove. The tapestry screen had disappeared and there were bare boards where the carpet had been. There seemed hardly a trace of the life she had so recently lived here. Certainly no trace of Hans could be found. When she looked in the wardrobe, his overcoat had gone: Frau Wingender, in her last act of patriotism, had handed
it in in one of the cloth collection drives. But she had left Franziska’s dress, as mutilated as she was herself, a red velvet folly belonging to some dreamed-up life that had barely existed.

  Franziska settled into the mournful remains of her old room. She handed over her invalid’s welfare to Frau Wingender in its entirety. It was barely enough to cover the rent, let alone food, but Frau Wingender was glad of any income. In Franziska’s absence rationing had taken hold. There was no more talk about victory; now all conversation revolved around the daily battle with coupons, the new currency. Eggs were down to two a month, a pound of potatoes daily, a half-pound of meat a week. Sugar was as rare as gold. Even their light was rationed. Curfew at eleven; the gas cut off at nine.

  Franziska would go shopping with Frau Wingender. It gave her something to do in the long days when Doris and Louise were at work. It was as good as a full-time occupation. Queuing at the butcher’s stall could take as long as three hours. Franziska shuffled upwards in the line praying that the ‘Sold Out’ sign would not go up before it was her turn. Standing pained her; the wound in her foot ached, her head throbbed, but though she longed to sit down she could not afford to lose her place in the line. Then it was on to the bakery to haggle for loaves. Even the food they did manage to get was not what it appeared to be. Strange impostor ingredients found their way into everything. Coffee was now roast barley with not even a whisper of cocoa powder; there was sawdust in the bread. An egg substitute appeared made of dyed potato starch. Buying clothes was out of the question without a purchase permit. Women were allowed only three dresses, two for work and one for Sundays. Franziska spent a whole day at the cobbler’s with a pair of Doris’s shoes worn right through. The shoemaker attached a pair of wooden soles to them; they crippled her, Doris said, but at least they didn’t leak. No one talked any more about the war being over; they worried instead about the next cut in rations.

  Winter came early that year and the Wingenders huddled in the apartment like cave-dwellers in a primitive dark, wearing their outdoor clothes and their leaky shoes, their stomachs acidy with hunger. They had entered War Time.

  WAR TIME WAS hungrier than hospital time; it devoured weeks of tedious occupation, the daily diet of bleak queue and bare larder. It induced a numbed torpor, standing in the shuffling crowd on the pavement outside the bakery on Ottostraβe, while snow fell in downy flakes. She could forget herself as the line inched slowly along the dreary, ill-lit street towards the mouth of the bakery. She could forget everything. The other women in the queue jostled and pushed as they neared the wicker baskets piled high with flat, black loaves. At first she would get infected by their urgency, but she was afraid since the accident that sharp elbows and the heaving of crowds might reopen her wounds. When a big push came, usually induced by a panicky rumour at the back that supplies were running out, she would stand aside, often losing her place. A kind of dull-witted indifference overtook her. What did it matter if she got her bread two minutes before the next woman in line? The only reason she stuck with it was that she could not go back to the Wingenders empty-handed.

  It did not escape Frau Wingender’s notice that when Franziska queued for bread it took her twice as long as when she sent one of her girls, or went herself.

  ‘You must fight your corner,’ she admonished Franziska, ‘it’s our bread, we’re entitled.’

  Frau Wingender was beginning to regret having taken Franziska back. The girl had not been right since that explosion. She would come across her in the kitchen, in the middle of washing up, elbows sunk in the greasy cold water, staring off into the distance in a kind of vacant trance, as if she had forgotten where she was. She would not hear Frau Wingender approach and yet the smallest noise – the scrape of a teaspoon in a cup, the clank of a pail in the courtyard below – produced a kind of startled panic as if in her ears it had been magnified to a terrifyng boom. She complained of headaches, cradling her skull in her hands, her fingertips vainly trying to quell the noises within.

  Doris and Louise found her strangely withdrawn. Even Louise conceded that whereas before she had been secretive and odd, now she was acting as if she was not all there.

  ‘As if’, Louise said, ‘she was lost in time.’

  She was. Everything seemed veiled and distant to her, as if the explosion had impaired her hearing and encased her behind glass. It was an underwater sensation, everything muffled, and then suddenly a crash of plates or the far-off wail of a siren would explode furiously. Her body was busily betraying her. It gave off the pretence of healing. New skin was growing on her hands, forming a spidery skein over the red raw parts of her, but it was less robust than her birth skin. It felt as fine as bone china. The tattoo of fish-bone scars, the shrapnel wound behind her ear, the star-shaped mark on her foot had all closed over, just as Dr Spitzer had predicted, but she felt they had enclosed a poison within, a festering, vaguely menacing lethargy, while her head boomed and echoed. She found it harder and harder to drag herself out to the market. And when she did, she found she couldn’t get her mind around the trade of coupons and papers. Once she presented her ration card for soap – one bar of fat-free per household – at the butter store and the Wingenders went without lard for a week.

  ‘You imbecile!’ Frau Wingender shrieked when she returned home.

  ‘I was the cleverest of all the Schanzkowskis,’ she roared back, but it was a hollow claim. Now memorising a simple list of provisions was too much for her.

  She had shouted to hear herself above the din inside her head. But Frau Wingender, taken aback by the violence of her outburst, took to keeping a strict eye on her. She noticed other strange habits. How the girl’s face would become animated and she would move her lips as if engaged in some heightened internal conversation; sometimes she would raise a finger as if lecturing to a small child, but no sound came out. She hid her mouth constantly behind her hand – a shy habit Doris and Louise used to tease her about – but which now, in the light of her other strangenesses, took on a furtive air. Frau Wingender stopped asking Franziska to do errands; she couldn’t afford any more short-changing on the potato allowance. Shortly it was not to matter anyway. By February 1917, there were no more potatoes.

  The potato harvest failed and the Swedish turnip, originally introduced to fill out the potato ration, became their staple diet. Not only did it replace potatoes but it found its way into the bread, even marmalade, so they said, though it was a long time since a pot of preserves had found its way onto the Wingender table. At least, Frau Wingender reasoned, the turnips were genuine and not some cobbled-up vegetable made from starch and dye. She baked and boiled them, she made soup out of them, which she served the girls for breakfast instead of coffee, she concocted a casserole, a glutinous mix of beef bouillon cubes, potato scraps and – turnips. At a certain level of deprivation Frau Wingender came into her own. The lack of beer helped. The breweries in Berlin had closed down and even on the black market she could not have afforded a bottle of spirits. Sobriety made her capable but, unfortunately for Franziska, less tolerant.

  Afterwards, Frau Wingender blamed the turnips for Franziska’s first bout in the asylum in Neuruppin. She came home from the market one afternoon in April. A watery sky hung over the city and Frau Wingender felt washed out, as much by the sullen weather as by the news she had heard at the market.

  ‘Guess what,’ she hollered as she set down a loaf on the table. Franziska was in her room, moping as usual, and Frau Wingender often conducted conversations with her between rooms in the apartment.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Franziska?’ she called again, doubtfully.

  She tiptoed out into the hall and pushed the half-open door with her hand. The girl was standing by the mantel, dressed in her wounded red dress, scored by knife marks. She looked almost gay in a ghoulish sort of way with her pale face and her ruined hands.

  ‘America has entered the war,’ Frau Wingender said redundantly.

  Franziska started to smile, then hurriedly
covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Don’t I look nice?’ she asked. ‘Fräulein Hackerl made it for me.’ She twirled around and the crushed fabric briefly flared at her heels.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear, you’re a real princess,’ Frau Wingender replied mockingly. ‘Now, any chance you would lend me a hand with the dinner?’

  ‘What are we having?’ Franziska asked in an imperious tone, as if she were the woman of the house and Frau Wingender a domestic. The cheek of her, Frau Wingender thought. Then she softened. The girl obviously had no idea how preposterous she looked, dressed up like Lady Muck in the middle of the day, in a dress as maimed-looking as herself.

  ‘Turnips,’ she said brightly, hoping to puncture the air of caged madness coming off Franziska. ‘For a change!’

  She followed Frau Wingender into the scullery. She donned an apron and turned the turnips out onto the chopping board. Then she fetched the carving knife from the sink. Standing there in her rich, torn velveteen, knife in hand, her hair falling in distressed trails around her face, she looked vaguely menacing. Frau Wingender was suddenly afraid. Hesitantly she turned her back and busied herself at the stove.

  Franziska started to slice through the stringy white turnips. There were still traces of clay on their whiskery skins. She attacked them viciously, stabbing at their hard hearts, cursing them under her breath. For her they were not just meagre war rations, they were the clogged earth of home, sodden and stale and poor. She had gone right back to the beginning. She halted in mid-slice, swept the pieces into the hollow of her apron and going to the window she threw them out, turnips and peelings; even the knife leaped in a silvery tizzy. Below it rained turnips; by the time Frau Wingender had rushed downstairs and into the yard there were already three or four ragged-looking children scrabbling for the pieces. She was lucky to retrieve the knife. She decided it was time to send word to the asylum.