Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  She picked up the photograph of herself and her amma, and put it in her bag before she changed her mind.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Wotcha.’

  They shared little except greetings and work stuff, things private investigators needed to share. Lee found it stressful. But how could he even open a conversation about what had happened when she never looked at him? Was she ashamed? He assumed she was, but he didn’t know.

  ‘How was your …’

  ‘Fine,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Settled in. She won’t find sharing with others easy, but hopefully she’ll have time to think.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And you?’

  The only way forward was to disappear into the work.

  ‘Bit of a windfall,’ he said. ‘One job, two cases and a man with some very serious money.’

  He told her everything that Levy had told him and then he handed her the pages from the file he’d already examined.

  ‘When we’ve both read everything he’s given us – there’s not much – we’ll have a chat about where we go from there. It’s not going to be easy,’ Lee said. ‘I’m just going out for a smoke.’

  Mumtaz made herself a cup of tea. Lee would be outside smoking for at least twenty minutes, which would give her a good run at this Mr Levy’s notes. But it wasn’t easy for her to concentrate. She knew that Shazia still saw Lee from time to time because her parents had told her. They were friends and she wanted to tell him that it was okay, but she couldn’t. It was ridiculous.

  They’d made love. Once. She’d just told Shazia the truth about her father’s death, the girl had stormed out and Lee had turned up to make sure she was alright. It had been passionate, tender and full of love. Only her subsequent guilt had ruined it. And it had – ruined it. He’d bared his soul, he’d told her he was in love with her, and what had she done in return?

  She’d pushed him away. Because that was what decent Muslim widows did. Especially widows who had let their husbands die.

  She opened Mr Levy’s file.

  Father met my mother in September 1945 in Berlin. He was with the British 131st Infantry Brigade and she was living in the cellar of her family’s house in a district called Niederschönhausen. When I was old enough to know about the Holocaust, I asked her how she’d managed to survive when her family had not. All she would ever say was that it was because she was lucky. My father took her out of the ruins of her parents’ house and her life began again. That was all I needed to know.

  I have subsequently researched that period of German history a little and have found that actually Niederschönhausen was not in the British but the Russian sector of the city after 1945. How my father came to be in such a place is therefore a mystery to me, as my understanding is that, although the Russians and the other Allied Forces met, control of the various sectors of Berlin was strictly regulated. But I may be wrong.

  Through the good offices of the Wiesenthal Centre, I managed to trace some of my mother’s family through both Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Her mother, Miriam, for whom my sister was named, died in Auschwitz in 1943, along with her husband, Dieter, a pharmacist. My mother’s brother, Kurt, died in Sachsenhausen in 1942. He was eleven years old. There are no records for Rachel Austerlitz, my mother. It seems to me that when her parents and her brother were taken by the Nazis, she disappeared. This fits in with her story such as it was. But how? By 1941 when the family were taken to Sachsenhausen, all Jews in Berlin had been rounded up. How did she evade that?

  But here I am assuming that my mother was Jewish, which I now know she wasn’t. Did my grandparents adopt her, maybe? She certainly took their name. The Nazis were nothing if not meticulous and her name is recorded with the other members of her family on a list of Jewish business people working in Berlin in 1937. So far I have been unable to find any other members of the Austerlitz family either living in Germany or Israel. Both my supposed grandfather’s brothers and their families died in Auschwitz too. But my researches are far from extensive, mainly due to my illness. The furthest I have got is to establish that my grandmother Miriam’s original surname was Suskind. These were also business people, employed in the rag trade. The Suskinds in turn were related, through my grandmother’s mother, to a family from Munich called Reichman and also to someone called Augustin Maria Baum. That isn’t the most Gentile name I’ve ever heard, but it comes close. This means that the Suskinds could have had at least one Gentile relation.

  A lot of people researched their ancestry via DNA testing. But in Mumtaz’s experience, it often threw up mysteries people hadn’t been expecting and didn’t really want. She knew of two clients whose real fathers had turned out to be strangers from different communities. This had led to strained familial relationships, vicious accusations and bitter guilt.

  She glanced at a few small newspaper cuttings about Miriam Levy from 1962, but the details contained in them were minimal. Not much more than a few fuzzy pictures of police officers searching Barking Park.

  Lee came back into the office and sat down. He looked at her.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve only got as far as Mr Levy’s own account of his researches and the newspaper cuttings,’ she said. ‘I’ve not looked at any of the documents.’

  ‘They’re mostly in German,’ Lee said. ‘Just go straight to his translations. But what do you think so far?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think it’s a massive job. But, given that Mr Levy is so sick, I think we should maybe concentrate on finding his sister. I mean his family history is fascinating, but …’

  ‘I agree. But Levy thinks that the disappearance of Miriam and his family history are connected.’

  ‘Because one of his mother’s ancestors may have been a Gentile?’

  ‘No,’ Lee said. ‘When I talked to him he didn’t bring that up. It’s more to do with the idea that his mother was a Gentile. That her existence was some sort of deception either perpetrated by her or by her parents.’

  ‘He mentions possible adoption …’

  ‘Which may have happened.’

  ‘But if so, then are there any documents to prove it?’

  ‘Anything where the Holocaust is involved can potentially be a problem, particularly when it comes to finding documents and living witnesses,’ Lee said. ‘The Nazis kept records but, at the end of the war, they destroyed a lot of them. Also, if Rachel was adopted, it may have been unofficial. People just took unwanted kids in back then. My Auntie Margaret was taken in by me gran. I only found that out long after old Auntie Mags had died.’

  ‘Yes, but this was a wealthy family, so I doubt whether that happened,’ Mumtaz said.

  She was right. Where a possible inheritance was involved, people were less inclined to just take unknown children in as their own. It didn’t make sense. Unless …

  ‘Unless the Austerlitzes took in both kids …’

  ‘Because Miriam Austerlitz couldn’t have children?’ Mumtaz said. ‘Maybe. But why Gentile children – if indeed Kurt Austerlitz was also a Gentile?’

  He shrugged.

  She looked him in the eye for the first time in ages and, for a moment, Lee wondered if she might smile at him too. But then she said, ‘So where do we start?’

  TWO

  ‘How fucking old do you think I am, Arnold?’

  Lee hadn’t really thought about it until now. Vi was just Vi. Fabulous in her own unique way, but …

  ‘You were alive in 1962,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Detective Inspector Violet Collins replied. ‘But I’d only just started primary school.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So unless you want me to talk to you about Janet and John or the relative merits of Black Jacks as opposed to Fruit Salads, I won’t have too much to offer,’ she said. ‘Anyway, what do you want to know about 1962?’

  Lee put his glass of Pepsi down on the scarred tabletop and watched Vi knock back her second gin and tonic of the evening with envy in his eyes. The Boleyn pub at
the top of Green Street in Upton Park had been Lee Arnold’s local, back when he was a soldier with a drinking problem, and then a copper with a drinking problem and a prescription drug issue. Now he was a sober, clean private investigator it was still his preferred boozer although, these days, it was more to do with the fact that the pub would for ever be connected to his favourite football team, West Ham United.

  ‘A one-year-old baby went missing when the Barking Park Fair was on that year,’ Lee said. ‘Her name was Miriam Levy and she was never found.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it,’ Vi said. ‘But I’ve never even heard of Miriam Levy. I was probably playing Cowboys and Indians with me brothers at the time. I went to the fair at Barking Park once or twice, but not until the seventies. This is a job …’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He went to the bar and got her another drink, then they both went outside.

  Lee lit Vi’s fag and then his own. He said, ‘I know one bloke over at Barking nick, or rather what they call a Police Office over there now. Ronny Brown, but he’s my age.’

  ‘Can’t help you,’ Vi said. ‘Old Barking nick was shut down. There’s some custody suite down by the Creek and that office, but … Leastways I can’t help you where Plod’s concerned.’

  ‘Does that mean you might know someone outside the Job?’

  She thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Who?’

  She paused again. ‘Leave it with me,’ she said.

  Vi knew a lot of people and, although what Lee really needed was information about the police investigation at the time, he left it there for the time being.

  When they finished their drinks, he took her home and they went to bed together – as they often did and had done for years, ever since they’d worked together at Forest Gate Police Station.

  The Red Army of the Soviet Union captured Berlin from its German defenders in April 1945. They didn’t take just that part of the city that would later become East Berlin, but the whole lot. Only later was Berlin divided up into sectors between the Soviets, the British, the French and the Americans. And so, until the British and other forces arrived in the city in July, the Soviets had the place to themselves. It was an aspect of European history that Mumtaz knew nothing about.

  Mumtaz leant against the back of her chair and thanked the Almighty for the Internet. Of course, until she dug somewhat deeper she would only get a sketchy outline of what had occurred in Berlin in 1945. But it seemed that the district of Niederschönhausen, where the Austerlitz family had lived, had not only been taken by the Soviets when they entered the city, but had remained exclusively under their control until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. So quite how Irving Levy’s father had met his mother under those circumstances, Mumtaz couldn’t fathom. Had Mr Levy senior met Rachel Austerlitz somewhere else in the city? Irving Levy was convinced his father had met his mother in her former home. But was that correct? Over time, the telling of stories altered and, whilst not actually lying, people misremembered and, unconsciously, filled in gaps with events that didn’t happen. As a psychology graduate Mumtaz knew this, but she also wondered whether deliberate lying had taken place too.

  Berlin in 1945, from the little she knew about it, had been a place ripe for the production of lies. A conservative estimate of the number of German women raped by the Soviets during the Battle of Berlin was two million. If that wasn’t a motivation to lie, she didn’t know what was. Because Mumtaz had been raped – by her husband – and that wasn’t anything one could tell just anyone, mainly because a lot of people didn’t believe that rape within marriage could exist. A man had his ‘rights’, just like the Soviet soldiers apparently had their ‘reward’ in the shape of German female bodies.

  Mumtaz felt cold. Some believed that the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, had promised his troops ‘Nazi flesh’ as reward for their loyalty and as payment for their own considerable suffering at the hands of Hitler’s army. Some openly admitted that they just did it because they felt like it. But accounts written by German women were scant and, where they did exist, anonymous. Because who could or would own up to being raped by so many men one lost count? Who would own up to the subsequent disease, the abortions and the psychological agony?

  No one and especially not, she felt, a woman who called herself Rachel Austerlitz.

  Whoever she had been.

  The garden was a nightmare. He’d not touched it all year and now bindweed was tapping at the stained-glass window of the downstairs lavvy. Not that the house and its considerable gardens had ever been exactly elegant – it hadn’t. But until he’d got sick, Irving had managed it.

  He’d not changed anything. He had maintained it and he had sorted out his parents’ possessions when they died. Now it looked like one of those houses where hoarders lived with junk piled up at the windows and weeds creeping across the pathways. He’d seen programmes on TV about it. People who wasted their lives looking after dreck.

  Had he wasted his life? He probably had, but what could you do? Like his father he’d spent every waking hour looking at, shaping and caressing some of the most magnificent stones the earth had ever produced. Stones worth millions. But he’d never had kids. He’d never even gone out with a woman.

  If he were dishonest with himself, he’d blame his parents. Always shouting at each other, arguing over nothing, dragging him into their fights as each tried to get the upper hand. But what was that? A detail. If he’d really wanted to go out and find a life for himself, he could have done. The truth was that he was lazy. Better stick with the things he knew – warring parents, a house stuck in the 1950s and the blinding glitter of diamonds.

  Right at the very back of his memory, he could just recall a time when his parents had behaved differently. Way before the fighting and the screaming – and Miriam. Was he wrong when he thought that all the really mad times came after she had been born? And disappeared?

  Of course, the disappearance of a child was enough to send anyone round the bend and so that must have been the beginning of things going downhill. When his mother had got pregnant he must have been five, but he remembered nothing about it. All he really remembered about that time was the fair, the Ling Twins and his mother screaming as if she was being murdered.

  Her dadu wanted her to make things up with her amma. Of course he did! Not that he knew anything about it. Both Shazia and her amma had told the old couple nothing. Shazia looked at the photograph Lee had taken of her and her amma at Barking Park Fair the previous year and she shook her head. Soon it would be fair time again, but she wouldn’t go.

  That evening had been such fun. Amma had gone on the dodgems where she’d proved herself to be quite the demon driver and had almost tipped Lee out of his car. They’d all got candyfloss round their mouths and she’d almost been sick when she went on the waltzer after eating the greasiest doughnut she’d ever had. Amma and Lee had kept on looking at each other the way her mate Grace used to look at her old boyfriend Mamba, and so she’d tried to give them some time to be alone together. She’d never been on so many rides on her own or gone to the toilet such a lot.

  It had, however, been during one of these jaunts to the loo that she’d got scared. Making her way past the helter-skelter and through the maze of caravans at the back of the site, she’d found herself alone between two vast low-loaders. She’d obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line and was about to choose which direction to take when a wizened figure approached her dressed in a silk dressing gown. At first, it had said nothing, but then as it, or as she later deduced she, got closer, the figure said, ‘Are you lost?’

  Shazia had smiled. A tiny old woman with a face like a brown leather pump was coming to help her.

  ‘I’m looking for the toilet,’ she’d said.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ the old lady had said. ‘Is not far. Let me take you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The woman’s voice was high-pitched and possessed an accent that Shazia couldn’t place. Not that she
spoke again. She simply took Shazia’s arm in one tiny hand and began to guide her past the low-loaders and out into the tangle of caravans. Threading an eccentric course between what were people’s homes, Shazia couldn’t help but look into windows where people were cooking, washing, having arguments and, in one case, kissing. She felt guilty. Why did people always feel they could look in through a lit window?

  Shazia, ashamed, lowered her gaze, which was when she noticed the old woman’s hand. Holding her elbow tight in what was a hard, sinewy grip, the hand was small, brown, withered and had the longest, most malformed fingernails Shazia had ever seen. Bright yellow and with the consistency of horn, these nails curled and twisted seemingly random courses away from her fingers, often resulting in vast circles as they came to sharp points at each tip.

  Fascinated but also a little scared, Shazia let herself be led by the woman until, or so it seemed, the noises from the fairground had almost receded to nothing. When she looked up again she found herself standing outside a small shed. This, she surmised, was probably, if not the toilet, then a toilet. It certainly wasn’t the one she’d been to before.

  She’d thanked the woman before she noticed that she was no longer holding her elbow. Now she had the toilet door open and was smiling a toothless grin, ushering Shazia forward with one bizarre, horn-encrusted hand. Shazia, her heart hammering, thought about just running, but now she really did want to go to the toilet and so, slowly and cautiously, she went inside and locked the door. Only once she’d finished did she hear laughter outside. Some weird old fairground type had clearly had a right laugh freaking her out. Fairground people were notorious for playing tricks on their punters and the boys who operated the waltzer always got girls pregnant. Or so Grace said.

  But when she left the cubicle, Shazia found that she was alone. She was also just steps away from the fairground where she could see Lee and her amma watching the brightly coloured carousel whirl round, carrying laughing children riding metal horses.