by Louise Fein
“Do you ever think of doing ‘it’?” I whisper.
“You are joking, aren’t you? Do I ever not think of it?” He pulls me closer. “Would you want to?”
The air is still and quiet. Water drips from sodden leaves.
“I don’t know . . .” But I do know. I desperately want it.
The weight of the idea, the vastness of it, hangs over us, heavy and penetrating as the fog, yet lighter than air. The impossibility. The idea of his bare skin on mine. The touch of his hands, the surrendering of myself to him.
The mingling of our blood.
“Hetty, it’s okay. We don’t have to. We shouldn’t. We won’t. I’d never do anything you didn’t want.”
And after that, we don’t talk of it anymore. He simply holds me, and I breathe him in.
Twenty-Eight
May 13, 1938
I know I should end it. That day we went to the zoo—I was weak. I should have done it then, because now, it is so much harder. But every time I sneak away to see you, I’m terrified we’ll be seen. I won’t get a second chance from Tomas. And now he calls for me, once a month or so. To see a film, or to go for a walk. Sometimes I can make excuses, but mostly I don’t. For your sake. Luckily his shifts at the factory are long, so he doesn’t get many days off. Walter, I’m so afraid we’ll be spotted together again. But today was a blissful day, warm and sunny, blossoms everywhere. With Mutti and Vati out celebrating Lord Mayor Otto Schultz’s birthday, we had time to take the tram south to the Leipziger Auenwald, where nobody we know could find us. You told me you loved me, that you wish we could spend the rest of our lives together. Then we kissed. I could do that all day and never bore of it. But now my heart aches with the bittersweetness of it all.
I pull up the loose floorboard at the back of my cupboard and place my journal inside this new, safer hiding place. I return the floorboard, then cover it with piles of spare linen and blankets. It’s early evening and Mutti and Vati are not yet back from their champagne lunch.
In the afternoon sitting room, I find the Leipziger Tageszeitung and flick through the news section. There are several national stories about zero unemployment and the country’s industrial successes.
I skim the editorial articles and Vati’s weekly section: “The Leipziger Moral Crusade.” There is a feature on the capture of a number of known “asocials,” guilty of the most foul moral degradation. I recall Vati mentioning that these people had been sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. The words concentration camp are rarely mentioned. When they are, people whisper them, as though, if you speak them out loud, you may bring bad luck and end up in one yourself. They are tucked away from view, hidden in remote places. It adds to their mystery, and the fear of them.
Vati says these are terrible rumors, caused by foreign newspapers printing false articles, stories supposedly gathered from inmates who’ve escaped from such camps. Foreign propaganda, he said, whipping up hatred for the German people. But now, I wonder. I think about Tomas’s father, and I feel a rush of fear. It seems impossible. After all that Walter has told me, could it be possible that these disturbing stories are true?
I throw down the paper. I remember a time, a couple of years back, when Vati took Karl and me into the offices of the Leipziger. He was keen to show Karl the wonder of the place and convince him that one day he would want to take over the running of it. We had looked in on the bustle of the newsroom, phones ringing, journalists rushing in and out, people shouting at one another. Vati had explained the time pressure to get stories and pictures into the paper for each edition. We’d watched the huge printing presses in action, the laborious task of setting the metal letters in the frames, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page. The whole effort—the working conditions, the sweat, the dirt, the heat and intensity—we had wondered to Vati, what was the point of all this when people would glance at the headlines and throw the paper away?
Vati was horrified. “This,” he had told us passionately, “is the most important tool we have. With these inked words, we can shape our nation. There is no such thing as news per se. News is power, wrapped in a message, presented, told, and retold. With this newspaper”—his eyes were filled with pride—“I have the power to put into the world what I want, and in the way I would have the masses understand. Do you realize what supremacy, what authority that gives me?”
But Karl remained fixed on wanting to fly airplanes, and I had not properly grasped what Vati meant, until now. I think of how it is for Walter. How it is for all the “enemies” of the Reich. How it is for me being in love with Walter, knowing that, every minute we spend in each other’s company, he is at risk of arrest. How many others are there like us? Simply because of who their parents are? Anger swells at the injustice. I see nothing inferior about Walter. Or, indeed, any of his kind. They, we, are all just people. And I see Vati’s newspaper, finally, for what it is. Not news, but manipulation of thought and mind.
“IF THEY DON’T come back soon, the schweinefleisch will be burnt to a cinder, and I’ll be blamed,” Bertha mutters to Ingrid. The dining room table is set for dinner. Ingrid has decanted the wine, and my stomach rumbles with hunger at the delicious smell of roasting pork emanating from the kitchen.
“The crispier the better,” I say, “I’m starving. Why don’t we eat anyway?”
“I couldn’t possibly! What would your mother say?” Bertha stands with her hands on her ample hips and her cheeks puffed out.
“Worked up a good appetite today, Fräulein Herta?” Ingrid smirks.
“What do you mean?” I feel my face flush beet red. “I went for a picnic with my friend Erna . . .”
“Ah! Is that what you call it—”
“Ingrid!” Bertha cuts in. “There’s three vases I noticed—in the hall, the morning room, and the dining room—where the flowers have gone over. Get rid of them and order some fresh to go in. Better still, go down to the florist’s now; they’ll still be open, and bring some back.” She turns angrily and begins scrubbing at the sideboard with her brush and soapy water from the sink.
I want to hug her for putting Ingrid in her place.
“Everything’s so upside down these days,” she says, once Ingrid has left the room. “The order of everything. It was all clear in the old days. Parents and children. Master and servant. The bosses and the workers. The upper classes and the lower. Now it’s all got muddled.” She moves to scrubbing the top of the cooking range, slopping water onto the hot surface so it sizzles. She scrubs hard, rocking back and forth, both hands atop the brush. “Everyone telling on everyone. Trying to get one better on people. Children ruling their parents. Servants their masters. It’s not right.” She sniffs hard and I wonder if she’s crying.
“I wasn’t doing any harm today, Bertha, I was—”
She turns slowly to face me. “I don’t want to know where you were or who you were with, Fräulein Herta,” she says. There is fear in her wide eyes. In her tense shoulders. “What you do in your spare time is your business and nobody else’s. And Ingrid would do well to remember that. But she thinks she knows better. She thinks because she has Karl’s ear . . .”
“Karl’s ear?”
Ingrid.
Bertha stares at me, eyes wretched.
“She likes to gossip, that one,” she says. “Wants special treatment. Praise. She wants to get noticed. And by gossiping, she gets what she wants. But I know one thing.” Bertha wiggles the brush, then plops it back into the sink. “It will end badly for someone. Her, in all likelihood. All I can do is tell her to keep her mouth shut.” She shakes her head and purses her lips. “You shouldn’t—”
But before she can finish her sentence, the front door bangs and Mutti’s and Vati’s voices fill the hallway. Bertha begins to bustle around, getting ready to serve the meal, and says no more about it.
Watching her, I wonder where her loyalties lie. With Hitler and the Fatherland? With the family, us, who she works so hard for? Or with her own folk, whoever an
d wherever they may be. Or perhaps, and the back of my neck prickles as I wonder, fleetingly, could it be that Bertha has some sort of secret sympathy with those excluded from this Aryan revolution?
Twenty-Nine
October 7, 1938
We walk separately, a hundred yards apart, past the soaring, classical structure of the university building, centuries old, solid and constant. I lift my face to the sun; a feathery breeze touches my skin. I glance back. He’s on the other side of the road. The slightest tilt of his head as he acknowledges my look. However many times we do this, it’s the same rush of adrenaline. Fear and excitement in equal measure.
I enter the small park beyond the university buildings. A park where Jews are forbidden. Thank God for Walter’s blond hair and blue eyes. A young man passes on his bike, a bag of books slapping heavily against his thigh. An elderly man shuffles in the distance with a stick. Nobody else is in sight. It’s as safe as it will ever be. I sit down and rest my back against the solid trunk of a tree. A couple of minutes later, he sits beside me.
“Hello, you.” I lean toward him for a quick kiss. “I have one hour at most.”
“Is that all?” His shoulders sag.
“I’m sorry, I’ll have more time next week—”
“It’s not that . . .” His voice falters. He looks wretched.
“Walter? What’s wrong?” I touch his shoulder.
He looks at me and swallows.
“Hey.” I rub his arm. “Not even a joke today?”
He shakes his head. He is deathly pale. “There’s something I must tell you.”
“What is it?”
He clears his throat. “My father finally accepted a few weeks ago that life here is intolerable. Hitler will take everything that’s ours, whether we remain here or not. He decided we must leave Germany, at whatever cost. So every day he’s been walking from embassy to embassy, queuing for hours on end, trying to get visas for the family. But, as I predicted, we’ve left it too late. We should have done this years ago. Now, like vermin, no country wants any more Jews.” I wince at his words. “We’re stuck,” he continues. “Except . . .”
“Except?”
“There is one way.” He sighs. “But it . . . I’m not sure I can go through with it.”
“Why? But you must.” My heart squeezes as I say it. The most important thing is that Walter is safe. So it’s good news. Walter doesn’t meet my eyes.
“It means me going alone,” he says in a flat voice. “I’ll have to leave my parents, my grandmother, all my family.” He scrunches his fists tight. “Worse still, I can’t bear to think of my life without you in it.”
“I don’t understand. Why is it that only you can go?”
He takes a long, deep breath. “We have good friends in England; the father is a doctor. They left Germany in 1933. They have a daughter who is a year older than me. Anna.”
“And they can help?”
“They think I would be able to get a visa . . .” He swallows again. “. . . if I’m a relative, and they guarantee to support me financially.”
“But you aren’t, are you? A relative, I mean. How—”
“Hetty . . . oh hell.” He looks skyward, then finally meets my eyes. With a jolt I see his are brimming with tears. “I have to become engaged to Anna. It’s the only way . . .”
I stare at him.
“What?”
“I mean, yes. Exactly that.”
“But you wouldn’t actually get married though? I mean, you’re only nineteen, and . . .”
“Yes. I would actually have to get married. The authorities over there . . . they check everything. It’s helpful that our friends are a good family. Well respected. Anna’s father, he’s an excellent doctor, and Anna, well, she is a lovely, kind girl, but she isn’t you. The last thing I want is to marry someone, anyone, other than you, Hetty.”
“Married?” Weakness spreads through my body.
“I mean, it’s a lot to ask of her, too, of course. I’ve no idea if she . . . has someone else. It’s so good of her to help me out.”
Good of her to help you out. What would I not give, to be in her position?
My brain has numbed. I cannot conjure any words.
Walter stumbles on, as if trying to fill the silence. “She’s the sort of girl my parents would want me to marry, I know, even if all this . . .”
I spring away from him, anger surging, sudden and unexpected, through my body.
“Don’t imagine for a single second this is easy,” Walter says fiercely, grabbing both my hands. “In addition to leaving you, and having to marry someone I have no interest in marrying, I have to leave my parents behind, and to what sort of future? This is tearing me apart. I told them I wouldn’t go. That I’d stay and see things through here, but my parents won’t hear of it. The fact I have a chance of a new life is all that is keeping them going.” Tears flow freely now, down both of his cheeks. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a man cry.
I nod, a lump forms in my throat, and I close my hands around his. We’ve always been doomed, us two.
“I love you, Hetty. I always will. But it seems we could never be. Not properly. Not here.”
“I’ve had these stupid daydreams, that one day, somehow, some way, we can be together. Live in another country, far from here where nobody cares who or what we are. But now . . .”
“I know.”
My nose begins to run and he hands me his handkerchief. I wipe my eyes and nose and put it into my pocket. Something of his to keep.
“How soon?”
“Nothing is fixed. I have no visa yet from the British, nor any permission to leave here because we have to pay the damned exit tax, and we don’t have any money, so honestly, I don’t know. It could be as soon as a few weeks. Let’s try and see each other as often as we can until then.”
I stare at him through the wash of my tears, trying to absorb all he has said.
“But everything’s changed now.” The enormity of it finally hits. “You’re getting married to another girl.”
“She will never know about us.”
Something collapses, folds in. A silent scream.
He pulls me toward him. “I am so very sorry. If it could be any other way, you know I would change it.”
“But we can’t let this continue, can we?” I push him away, slap his chest. I want to yell at him. Hit him. Make him feel my pain. “It’s better we stop it now.”
I stand in a rush and back away.
“Is that really what you want?”
He comes toward me, tries to take me in his arms, but I fight to be free.
“No, Walter, of course not. None of it is. But it has to be, doesn’t it?” I’m trying to hold the pieces of myself together. “I have to go. Good luck with your new life in England. And good luck with Anna.”
“Hetty—this isn’t fair!”
I walk away.
“So this is it? Just like that?” He runs after me. “Hetty—”
“It’s for the best. For me, I can’t . . . Please, Walter. Just let me go.”
I feel him watching as I walk. Silently. In shock.
I don’t look back as I leave the park and pass quickly beneath the looming university buildings, casting a deep shadow across my path. I should go home, but I can’t bear to. I keep walking until I can no longer see Walter, nor him me. Then I collapse against a wall and sob. Deep, racking cries, as though I’ve been told my life is to end. My life might as well be over.
No longer caring if I’m late, I wander the streets for a long time. It’s one thing to accept Walter may have to live somewhere else, one day. But this. This. Walter to marry a girl called Anna.
How can I ever come to terms with that?
SOMETHING IS WRONG.
A sense in the air that makes the hairs on my arms stand up as I step through the front door. Ingrid appears, her face pinched; she has a tense look in her eyes.
“Oh, Miss Herta. At last. You must go straight to the after
noon sitting room. Your parents are waiting for you.” She hovers while I take off my outside shoes. Her words, her tone, aren’t unkind. Her usual sneer, absent.
I hurry in to find Vati standing near the window, silhouetted against the light. Mutti is on the sofa. She looks up at me, her face tearstained. Her eyes are red and swollen.
“Oh, Hetty—” She slaps a hand over her mouth as she begins to sob, deep, heart-wrenching sobs.
“I’m sorry I’m so late. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” I peer at the clock on the mantelpiece. I must have lost all track of time.
Vati shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter now.” He comes over to me, his face the color of ash.
Mutti lets out another sob. Could she have found out about Hilda Müller and the girl-child? Did Oma die? Have they found out about Walter?
“It’s Karl . . .” He can’t finish the sentence and stares at me with stricken eyes.
“Karl?”
“There’s been an accident.” He holds a telegram limply at his side. “He’s . . . dead.”
Through the thin brown paper of the telegram, I can make out the outline of the mighty Luftwaffe eagle, uneven letters stamped into words beneath. News. Plain, simple news.
The telegram blurs and a buzz as loud as a swarm of bees fills my ears.
“It can’t be true.” I exhale. “Mutti?”
People don’t die when they are nineteen years old. They don’t die when they are brimming with life and energy. They can’t die when they are beautiful and strong and Karl and my brother.
The words are wrong. They must be.
But Mutti continues sobbing, her hand over her mouth, her whole body heaving and shaking. Vati goes to her and wraps his arm tightly around her shoulders. I can’t bear to look at his slack face and hollow eyes.
“Please,” I try again.
“It’s true,” Mutti gasps through her tears. “Karl’s dead.”
“Your brother—” Vati begins, but then shuts his mouth and shakes his head.
