All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Sarah, in one of her rare light moments, will tell her a little later, ‘The perfect way to not draw notice to a stranger, a whore with a female friend on her arm.’ The shop owners might take them in with middle-class contempt, but not the police, not those who stand with their thumbs in their belts and display their armbands. They take their cut. They know who to leave alone. Carla is invaluable. ‘They cannot conceive that a woman like that might have subversive thoughts, cannot at some time be used to inform.’

  The woman led her across tramlines and between the heavy swinging trams, across to the side of the huge square towards crammed shabby streets. Crowds milled in the big open space with what seemed a vague intent but no immediate focus. A sense of life on edge. Most of the men seemed poorly dressed, restless and alert. Some spoke to Carla, amused by the dull woman who held her arm. ‘Auntie come to town?’ ‘Two for the price of one?’ Carla said the city was like a fuse, who knows when it might flare? But oddly it was music she then talked about, her friends in some of the clubs that were being closed down, the musicians no longer allowed to play. She mentioned names as though naturally the woman she walked with would know who she meant, and Ruth felt her remoteness from so much, how like a kind of dark carnival all this was, a world in which Sarah surely must be at risk? ‘She moves often,’ Carla said. ‘Luckily this time she is close to Alexanderplatz so we are almost there. The papers she wrote for of course have been shut down. So much comes and goes.’ Then Carla laughed, not unkindly, but her words stinging for all that as she tells Ruth she so looked the kind of harmless woman from outside the city, as if nothing apart from groceries would occur to her, she would make the perfect cover. Yet provincial as she might be, Ruth picks up from Carla’s constant looking about, the pressure of her arm, that her guide is anxious too, but brave for whatever was required, and would get on with it. Then she is left at a door that Carla taps at and walks away before it is opened, and her sister is in the unlit hall, waiting for her.

  She had always known that comfort was not of great importance to Sarah, that so much of it at home had irked her as a teenager. As Vati joked about it, the girl was a cradle Marxist without needing to read Marx. But the raw dampness of the apartment, its lino-covered floors and cheap furniture, repels her. Sarah takes in her glance. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘there are worse things. At least your bed is fine.’

  She leads through to the kitchen with its table, its two chairs, its books and papers neatly piled on the floor. A small kerosene heater glows like a red fist against one wall. ‘Better to keep your coat on,’ Sarah says. Only now do they embrace. Ruth runs her fingers on her sister’s cheek, feels the thinness of her through the cardigan she wears. Again Sarah spells out what her sister thinks. ‘You don’t come to Berlin to be another plump Aunt Hannah.’

  ‘That’s as well,’ Ruth laughs with her.

  Sarah takes a plate from a cupboard, and two cups for coffee from a pot that simmers on a burner. Slices of sausage, a square of cheese, two slabs of bread. ‘Looks like breakfast I know, but if you’re hungry.’

  Ruth tells her, after that train journey it’s Die Silbergrotte, a favourite place when they were children and were taken for a special treat. The man behind the counter with one arm stumped from the same war as Uncle Sol’s, his suit sleeve folded back and held against his shoulder with an ornamental pin, an injury that so fascinated them as girls, and Mother instructing them to stare at something different about someone was not what polite people did.

  They drink more coffee, and when the heater flickers out Sarah brings blankets to wrap around them. So much to speak of, to catch up on. Sarah tells her what of course could not have been said in letters home. That Albert through some church group had heard word of Lisabet, whose name had changed even before she was taken there. She would be a schoolgirl speaking English, what turns history takes! ‘As if you need ask,’ she says, to Ruth’s ‘You must miss her.’

  It was beyond her sister’s comprehending, the belief Sarah so held to, the belief one gave up everything for or betrayed one’s soul. It was almost ten years now since the baby was adopted out. One could not work as a journalist for the party, as an organiser, a courier, and expect a family life. ‘We will win, you know,’ Sarah had said. That time back home a few years before. ‘There’s an imperative larger than our own designs.’ Words that meant so little to her sibling, who had known since they were at school Sarah’s certainty that the future was their own to make.

  ‘They must be after you, then,’ Ruth says. ‘All the time.’ She means those she had seen at the station, the uniforms, the slogans. Their cold strutting excitement at dressing up.

  Sarah shrugs, as if too weary to agree. She says, rubbing her wrists as though they ached, ‘We should talk about Vati. What he plans.’ And so Ruth tells her of the arrangements he was making even now, the quick leaving he had in mind that of course would distress their mother and the others, but at least their father saw at last nothing could be delayed. ‘We must work out a way to let you know. Once we are there. Wherever we get to.’

  ‘I move about,’ Sarah says. ‘But we’ll find a way. Albert will help.’ Albert whom she is no longer with, who moved in some years back with a comrade from Bremen, but the personal must be put aside, she implies. This is not the old world we live in now. But of course they saw each other still. Never forget he was the one who arranged little Lisabet’s new life. She was insistent that Ruth knew that. It would be impossible had they left things until now. The comrades had seen what was coming so much more clearly than most. The one important thing he might do, he had done. ‘Whatever else.’ They sat on in the cold kitchen, talking until late, until Ruth touched her sister’s arm and told her, ‘You’re exhausted. We must go to bed.’

  When they stand Sarah picks up from the table the bank draft their father had sent Ruth expressly to give her. Enough there for England. America. Wherever she chose.

  ‘You’ll use it? You’ll arrange things too? You must.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sarah says. But almost indifferently, it seems to Ruth. As if weary even about herself. She takes the manila envelope, raises the corner of the lino at the side of the room to slip it beneath. Nothing more is said of it.

  For a few moments, then, a reaching back in both their minds to the big bedroom years ago at home, as they now go to the freezing room across the corridor. ‘Don’t undress,’ Sarah tells her, assuming there is no reason to spell out something so obvious. One never knows. This is the way things are. She lies beside her sister in the narrow bed. Their hands meet, and at once her breathing alters, and she is asleep. Ruth presses close to her, thinking back to then.

  When she wakes, Ruth is in bed alone and hears voices from the kitchen. She stands at the door, to see Sarah sitting at the table, her chin on her closed fist, her hair falling to one side, curtaining her face. A man stands leaning against the wall by the unlit heater. Ruth shivers at the heavy chill. She has seen the man before, but only in photographs when Sarah was back home years before. He is tall and fair-haired, his arms folded, his head tilted forward as he speaks quietly, then stops and turns as she enters. He nods as though they might have known each other for years. There is a scar across one eyebrow like a tiny track.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth says. ‘I overslept.’ She senses an urgency that places them beyond normal courtesies, even that of saying who they are. Sarah says simply, ‘It is better, Ruth, if you leave at once.’

  Albert explains in a few sentences. The growing unrest these last weeks. The rabid, brawling marches, the daubed yellow stars. The humiliations, the confiscated shops. There are rumours of worse to come and very soon, today even. Tonight. Although one scarcely needs the rumours, there is the stink of it already in the streets, in the air one breathes. Sarah looks at her sister. ‘I want you to go right away.’

  That is what she and Albert have been speaking of. Even if it means travelling north, then connecting back to Breslau in a roundabout way. This morning, she says. Ri
ght away. Her friend will walk with her to the station. She herself will move out after they have gone. Not that there are guaranteed safe places, but some are safer than others, one has faith in that. Albert watches both women as they walk to the small hallway. ‘Better not to take that,’ he advises, and Ruth puts down the small valise she had carried with her the night before.

  The sisters embrace. ‘You must eat more,’ Ruth says, smiling at how inane she must sound to clever Sarah, who says only, ‘You will let me know? About everything?’

  Walking here last night with Clara it had seemed as if they were in some kind of fairground, the moving shadows, the groups of men in cafés, the seethe of pedestrians that moved more as though circling itself than with direction, the sense of being on the verge of more than was taking place. How different, the feeling that came to her this morning. The grey light washing across the facades of buildings, the apparent ordinariness of a city’s day beginning, and yet it was more than that, as if the dregs of last night’s anticipation lay there still.

  ‘Walk as though you are used to all this,’ Albert says, as they cross in front of the huge Bahnhof, into the ringing hall, the announcements, the long drifting banners, the echoed shouting she could see no source for, the presence yet again of military figures. That sense always, so it seemed to her, of performance, of display; and yet behind them, through them, the newspaper kiosks, the food stalls, the tables where already foaming glasses are placed by waitresses with puffed homely sleeves, the haste and loitering of travellers. The life of ordinary things.

  Ruth asks, ‘Will there even be trains? The ones we need, I mean?’

  Albert laughs. He assures her, ‘There are always trains.’ He hands her the ticket he has ready for her. They stand back as a man with a barrel-accordion is ushered through from a platform, four uniformed men accompanying him, and a woman who screams at them until she too is taken with them. ‘So much for music,’ Albert says. Yet it is strange, Ruth thinks, how little she feels for the man who is helping her, her niece’s father. The oddness of thinking of him as that. Who at least had got the girl away.

  There is an unreality about all that she now looks at, walks through, towards the Wartezimmer für Frauen for those with first-class tickets. Albert holds back the door for her, and then he is gone. She sees him walk towards a man in uniform. He is lost in the crowd.