‘Viola is cross with me, so she’s not coming to the fair,’ Liesl said.
‘Why is she cross with you?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Do you know?’
Liesl sighed. ‘Well, she says it’s because I only want her to go so I can talk to Ben, but that’s not true. I wanted to cheer her up. She’s been so sad since you told them the truth about not being able to go home to their families. And she said I don’t understand, that everything is so much better for me and Erich than the others.’
Elizabeth pulled Liesl’s head onto her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. ‘She’s hurting, pet. You know the reason we are going to make the farm much more welcoming, don’t you?’ Elizabeth’s eyes locked with hers.
She nodded and said the words out loud for the first time. ‘Because some of them won’t be going home ever.’
‘Exactly. I couldn’t say it as bluntly as that, but yes, that’s probably the truth. We’ll do all we can to find their families, but in some cases, I fear it won’t be possible.’
‘We read about Warsaw in the paper, so I think she kind of dreads hearing any more news.’ Liesl’s heart broke for her friend.
‘It’s impossible to say, and even harder to imagine, but yes, Warsaw seems to have been particularly badly affected, so she has every reason to worry. I know it’s hard, but maybe we need to just be patient with her.’
‘Yes. But she says it’s all right for Erich and me because we’ve got you and Daniel and this lovely home. That so even though we’re sad about our parents, it’s not as bad for us. And she’s right.’ Liesl struggled to give her friend the benefit of the truth.
Elizabeth took Liesl’s hand and looked into her eyes. ‘Sometimes when we are hurt, we hurt others just… Well, I don’t know why, but we just do. Trying to make other people feel as bad as we do or something, I don’t know. My mother loved me, I know that now, but I spent all my adult life thinking she didn’t because she was so hurtful to me when I married Rudi.’
Liesl listened carefully.
‘But now I realise she was lonely. She didn’t want me to marry someone English and never come home, and because she was so hurt and so sad, she drove me away instead of holding me close. She was the same with my daddy. He loved her, and she seemed like she was always mean to him, but in those letters I found, the ones that she’d written for years to me but never posted, she talked of how her heart broke the day he died, how she never really got over it. How losing me too was the hardest thing, but that she knew I loved my father more and that if I had found happiness with Rudi, I wouldn’t want to come back anyway. It was all so wrong, Liesl. She got it all wrong, but by the time I realised it, it was much too late.’
‘But what does that have to do with Viola?’ Liesl asked.
‘Viola is hurt. Her little heart is broken because the chances of anyone surviving in Warsaw are slim. After she read that article, she asked Levi to tell her the truth about all of it, and he did, so that’s why she’s lashing out. She’s angry and confused and so deeply sad, and those are all normal reactions. She loves you, Liesl, but she’ll need some time to come to terms with this, and all you can do is be there for her when she needs you. Let’s invite her for lunch on Saturday – I’ll make something nice. Remind her that you do understand, that you lost your home and family too. And yes, you do have Daniel and me, but it’s not the same as your own parents…’
‘It kind of is though…’ Liesl said quietly.
The words hung between them.
‘What do you mean, sweetheart?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say this, and I feel really guilty about it, but honestly I think even if I could go back now, to Berlin I mean, I wouldn’t want to. I feel like our home is with you and Daniel. I know Papa is dead, and we don’t know about Mutti, but even if they weren’t…’
‘Oh, my lovely Liesl.’ Elizabeth rubbed her hair and kissed her forehead. ‘I’m so glad that you feel like Daniel and I are your parents. It feels like that for us too, and we love you both very much and feel so privileged to have been blessed with you and Erich. And of course you are bound to feel a little detached from your life before. It’s how we cope, you know?’
She didn’t want Liesl to feel guilty about being happy, but it was inevitable, she supposed.
‘I thought for years that I had no feelings about my mother, but then I came back here and realised I had lots of feelings. I had just bottled them up because it was too hard to deal with them every day. Your mutti and papa are in here’ – she laid a finger on Liesl’s temple – ‘and in here’ – she pointed to the girl’s heart – ‘and they will be there forever. The love you have for them and they for you, nothing can erase that – not time, not distance and certainly not that evil man Hitler. But in order to function on a day-to-day basis, we put things away.’
She tucked a strand of Liesl’s hair behind her ear. ‘So don’t worry, darling. You are not forgetting them in favour of Daniel and me. We all love you – Ariella and Peter and us – and you never have to choose, ever. I pray to my parents and to Rudi all the time, though I’m not much of a churchgoer as you know, that one day you will be reunited with Ariella. And when that day comes, my wish will come true and I’ll have to let you go. And that will be the best day of my life and also the worst, but it’s what I wish for with all my heart.’
‘I love you, Elizabeth,’ Liesl said.
‘And I love you, my darling girl.’ Elizabeth squeezed her hand. ‘And don’t worry about Viola – she’ll be fine. You all will. You won’t ever forget, of course not, but hearts are like legs or arms that break – even if you don’t want them to, or could never imagine them healing, somehow they do. Viola needs time and lots of love and support, and you are a great friend, so I know you can do this for her.’
‘I’ll try anyway,’ Liesl agreed, feeling better.
‘And on the matter of Ben…’ Elizabeth went on.
Liesl coloured. She didn’t want anyone to know how much she thought about him.
‘He seems like a very nice boy.’ Elizabeth smiled.
‘He is,’ Liesl agreed, flushing a darker red.
‘And we don’t mind you being friends, so it’s not like you need to have a chaperone to pass the time of day with him. We don’t want you to feel like you’re doing something wrong. But you are young and he’s a bit older, so we’re trusting you not to get yourself into any situations that wouldn’t be right for someone your age, all right?’
‘All right.’ Liesl smiled. ‘But we can spend some time together, on our own?’
‘Hmm.’ Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. ‘Alone but in company, is that fair enough? So you can chat with him when we visit the farm, and you can even invite him here for his tea one evening if you like, but no sneaking off anywhere, just the two of you.’
‘He’s a nice boy. Even if we were alone, he wouldn’t…’ Liesl was anxious that Elizabeth like him.
‘I know that, and believe me, if we thought he was otherwise, he wouldn’t be coming within a donkey’s roar of you, our precious girl. But hard as it is to imagine, I was once a young girl, and more to the point, Daniel Lieber was once a boy and knows what goes through the minds of young men when it comes to pretty girls.’
‘Something similar to what goes through the minds of old men, I’d imagine,’ Liesl responded, and Elizabeth pealed with laughter.
‘You are one hundred percent correct, my love. That’s exactly what they think about, so as the nuns would say, it is up to us much more sensible female creatures to curb the worst of their carnal desires!’
‘But not too much,’ Liesl said with a mischievous wink.
Elizabeth chuckled as she rose and pulled Liesl up with her. ‘Don’t let Daniel hear that, or he’ll have poor Ben thinning turnips until he’s so exhausted all he’ll think about is sleep!’
Chapter 18
Ariella was rooted to the spot. Every fibre of her being told her to run, but she couldn’t.
Willi’s strong
arm pulled her inside, and she noticed that he walked with crutches – one leg was gone from the knee down.
She struggled to take in the scene. Frau Braun was in the kitchen, nursing a wound on her face – the door from the hall was open so Ariella could see her. Willi went to her, examined the cut and held a blood-soaked cloth to it, but that was not what was most shocking.
On the floor, in the middle of the narrow hall, was Herr Braun, blood congealing on his head. He’d been shot and was clearly dead.
‘What…’ Ariella asked, unable to formulate additional words.
Willi looked at her while still tending to his mother. ‘I came back to find him attacking her. I just…’
She could tell he was going into shock. He was deathly pale, and his hands were trembling as he dabbed his mother’s wound.
‘Frau Braun.’ Ariella skirted around the body and the blood oozing onto the tiles. ‘Are you all right?’
The woman who had kept her safe for four long years seemed strangely calm. ‘He found your letters and the bed in the attic. He knew I was hiding someone. He demanded that I tell him where you were. I didn’t know…’ She spoke as though she were in a trance. ‘He attacked me, and then Willi…’
Ariella thought quickly. ‘He’s a Nazi official. Someone will come looking for him. We should get rid of the body.’
‘No.’ Willi seemed calmer now. ‘Mrs Bannon, my mother told me what she did.’
Was he going to hand Ariella over, even after killing his father? He must have noted her look of terror.
‘I’m so proud of her, and I’m so glad she was able to help you. Please, don’t worry.’ He pointed at his uniform. ‘I hate this, I hate them, everything they’ve done. You have nothing to fear from me.’
Relief flooded through her. There was something about him; she trusted him.
‘Now, let’s see what we can do. I’m not sorry – he was a terrible person and the world is better off without him – but you’re right, they will come looking for him. We could drag him out into the street, as there are so many dead bodies these days, but we might be seen. I have a plan.’
As Willi outlined his idea, both Ariella and his mother listened incredulously. When he’d finished, Ariella was the first to recover. ‘And you’re sure this friend’s house is empty?’ she asked.
‘A hundred percent. He and his family have fled the city. He gave me the key in case I needed it. We are both involved with the White Star, a resistance movement, so he knew an empty apartment might come in useful.’ Despite the gravity of the situation, Willi grinned. He was as she remembered him, a cheerful boy, now a man.
‘And we just go and set up there, leaving your father’s body here?’ Ariella was trying to figure everything out.
‘Look, people are being killed every day. There is no possibility of them knowing who did it, and I’m sure a man like Hubert Braun has plenty of enemies. We leave him here and say nothing. People will just assume we’ve fled the city. Nobody round here will care anyway – they have enough to worry about, and he wasn’t exactly popular.
‘My friend’s place is on the other side of the city. We move in, you and me as a married couple and my mother. Nobody will bat an eyelid. If anyone asks, we were sent there by the housing authority after we were bombed out – me being a wounded veteran fighting for the glorious Reich meant we got a nice place. We’ll let on we are well connected, and nobody will dare question it.’
She agreed, and together they cleaned up the still traumatised Frau Braun as best they could. Her husband had punched her full in the face and had been wearing a ring, so he’d cut her badly. Ariella went upstairs, got her some clean clothes and discarded the blood-spattered ones. She helped her dress while Willi packed a bag of anything he could put his hands on. They would not be coming back.
As they went to leave, Frau Braun pointed to a framed photograph of a little boy on a tricycle; it was of Willi aged around five. ‘Bring that, and the one of you with the football cup upstairs beside the bed.’
With a mock groan, Willi gathered the photos and dropped them into the bag. ‘I was a good-looking kid, wasn’t I?’ He grinned.
Ariella was astounded he could be jovial, but she smiled – his grin was infectious. ‘You were,’ she agreed. He was as incorrigible as she remembered him.
Luckily, injured people no longer drew any attention. They let themselves out the back, neither Willi nor his mother casting even a backwards glance at Hubert’s body.
The walk across the battered city felt less terrifying for Ariella now that she was with the Brauns. Her situation was only slightly less precarious, but at least she was no longer alone. They walked for over an hour. When they arrived at the apartment, it was late, and the streets were in darkness. The hallway smelled musty and of cooked cabbage, but they climbed the stairs to the second floor gratefully.
The small two-bedroom apartment was comfortable, and the family must have taken nothing with them when they left as it was fully furnished; they had just locked the door and told nobody but Willi of their plans. Ariella and Willi put Frau Braun to sleep in one room that had a single bed and warm blankets. The older woman was exhausted, and the wound on her face looked sore.
They stood in the parents’ bedroom.
‘Best we both sleep in here in case anyone bursts in – at least we can stick to the story. I’ll sleep on the floor, and you take the bed,’ Willi offered, and she agreed. She was shattered. She had no nightclothes, so she just crept under the covers as she was.
She was tired but couldn’t sleep. Willi was on the rug beside her. She’d given him the quilt and had kept a sheet and a thin blanket, but she could hear him struggling to get comfortable.
‘Please, this is your friend’s place. You should have the bed,’ she whispered, throwing back the covers.
‘No, I’m fine. Go to sleep,’ he whispered back.
She stood over him and saw him wince in pain. ‘Is it your leg?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘It got me home, though, so I’m actually grateful. Otherwise I’d be preserved in Russian snow for all eternity.’ He struggled to laugh.
‘Do you have anything for the pain?’
He shook his head, his teeth clenched.
She crept to the bathroom and looked in the cupboard under the sink. Nothing. The family had left, taking almost nothing – surely they had a medicine chest?
She went to the kitchen, quietly so as not to wake Frau Braun, and opened each of the doors. There was very little in the way of food, but to her relief, over the Bakelite oven was a white tin with a red cross painted on it. She opened it and found some sachets of meperidine. She remembered the dentist giving some to Peter for a savagely painful toothache. She took one and mixed the powder with a little water from the tap – the mains were thankfully still connected – and returned to Willi.
‘Drink this,’ she said, and he willingly swallowed it down, wincing at its bitter taste. ‘It will work in a while. In the meantime, please get into the bed.’
‘No.’ Then he reconsidered. ‘Look, this is not an untoward advance, but it’s a big bed. We could share it?’
‘Fine.’ She got back in her side, and Willi lay on the other, fully clothed. She felt him twist and turn for a while, trying to get comfortable, but eventually he was still and snoring gently. She turned and looked at him in profile. The meperidine was working. His dark hair was longer now than was military regulation, and he looked more like the boy she remembered. With his dark curls, brown laughing eyes and olive skin, he looked more Mediterranean than German. He had been a handsome boy, and despite everything, he had retained his good looks. She drifted off to sleep herself.
Days slipped into weeks as they managed in the new apartment. As Willi predicted, nobody questioned them, and he went out and came home with a little food most days.
Willi had false papers and new ration cards made for himself and his mother, and he’d had Ariella’s papers changed to indicate she was a married woman. The
y were now Frau and Herr Weiss, and his mother was Katrina Weiss. He even found a piece of copper that he polished and made into a ring for her. It slipped easily into the indent left by her beautiful Swiss gold band.
Once Willi’s mother went to bed, he and Ariella would talk long into the night, and she found him such an easy companion. She wept for Peter and her children; he told her how much he hated his father and how he’d vowed as a boy to one day kill him for all the abuse he meted out to his mother.
He described the events of the day before she knocked on the door. He’d come back to find Hubert laying into his mother, demanding she tell him who was hiding in the attic, and something had snapped in him. Willi had endured his father’s brutish behaviour for so long, and now that he was back and so proud of his Nazi connections, Willi could take no more. He took his father’s pistol and shot him with it. He felt no remorse.
He told her about his involvement with the White Star since before the war, his horror at being conscripted. That a teenage group of resisters to Nazi Germany even existed was news to Ariella, and that Willi Braun was a member since the start was at such odds with the image his parents had presented to the world.
Willi explained that he refused to join the Hitler Youth, even though his father had beat him mercilessly. He hated what the Nazis stood for and so sought out the company of other young girls and boys who refused to conform. They wore their hair longer – Ariella remembered Willi’s long dark hair before the war – and rejected the military look so much admired by their peers, opting instead to wear lederhosen and loose jerseys.
The Emerald Horizon (The Star and the Shamrock Book 2) Page 12
