Present-day 1945
Stefano knocks softly on the window near the sofa where Rosalind sits weeping. They lock eyes through the glass before she stands to let him in. She has dried herself and replaced her wet clothes with a housecoat.
“Georg is in the hut.” Stefano follows her back to the sofa, where he sits close beside her. “He says he wishes to stay there. I think you should lock the door and leave him out there.”
“Everything is worsening,” she says. “I cannot see that it will ever get better.”
“He needs medical help.”
“I have been fooling myself about my husband. I don’t think our relationship will ever return to normal.”
Stefano doesn’t wish to talk about their marriage.
“He is afraid of Erich,” says Stefano, changing the tone, remembering how agitated Georg was at the sight of him, his hands opening and tightening.
“He is not sure how to be around people. He probably senses that Erich doesn’t like him, or perhaps he is jealous of Erich. He might think that he’s taking me away. Or worse.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Why does Georg think anything strange at all? It is all due to the same reason. All because of a bullet.”
“And the drugs,” says Stefano.
“He has been growing more unstable,” she says. “At first the drugs were making him passive, but the more he took, the more he wanted, and now he reacts badly. He breaks things. He broke things in Erich’s house.”
“He told me earlier, when I went and spoke to him outside, that Erich doesn’t live there. That the house belongs to him, not Erich.”
Rosalind’s lips press together.
“You cannot take notice of what he says.” She turns to face him. “I want to thank you. I know I didn’t sound grateful for saving my life, but I am. Some days I think perhaps . . . well sometimes it might be for the best if he would get it over with and put me out of my misery.”
“You should not think such things.”
She is weeping again, silently, her face turned away so he cannot see the tears. He remembers the sounds of his mother’s cries that weren’t silent. He remembers the last night he spent with her, and the sadness at being apart from her, Nina, Toni, and the others, the fear of losing everyone who mattered.
Rosalind lies back down on the couch. “Would you stay awhile?” she asks.
Something about her request sounds too restrictive, but he must do what he has to.
“Yes.”
7 August 1942
Dear Papa,
I am still in Vienna. Erich made many inquiries about your whereabouts but to no avail. I’ve been miserable thinking about you, wondering if you have been taken elsewhere. Erich thinks you have been transferred to a camp far away. I cried for days when he told me. But I will never give up on you, Papa.
We will soon be leaving for Germany to stay at the river houses with Rosalind and Georg, and I am praying for this time to come quickly. It is painfully boring here. The women I am expected to mix with here talk about subjects that don’t interest me. I can’t bear the thought of going to another function. They are always trying to impress one another with their wealth and their knowledge of politics, of which there is very little. This tedious talk is something I bear, and I can’t say what I really think of anything. I want to tell them they are all wrong. I want to tell them about my friends who were sent away, about how Alain would climb fences to avoid the Gestapo on the way home from the club. But I bite my tongue until it bleeds, and I think of you and grow another inch taller.
Today I walked to the square in Vienna. It is not quite the same Austria as I remember. There are soldiers in the street, and it is not as colorful. People do not dress up like they used to. Traditional folk dances and festivals are held, but there is a certain formality to them rather than gaiety. And once they are over, we all go home. In the days when I was small, I remember the dances and parades that you took me to. I remember that we would hang around the square, all of us, the whole town, until late in the night. I remember the fireworks. It is a different Austria, one that you will not recognize and one that I daresay you cannot spy through the cell walls that most likely surround you.
Sometimes I see you in the square where the men play cards. I know you liked to tease the older ones who came there, and they would joke that you were the baby of their group. You took me once; do you remember? And you bought me ice cream, and I sat and watched you play cards, and when I got bored, I would run after the pigeons in the square.
The streets here are still beautiful, but I wish you were with me. It is so lonely sometimes.
I pray daily that you are being treated well, wherever you may be.
Love,
Monique
CHAPTER 21
ROSALIND
There is a knot in Rosalind’s stomach. She saw the look that Georg gave Erich. He knows, she thinks. He remembers things, perhaps everything. Part of her wants Stefano gone so that he does not learn the truth, but part of her, the dark part, the part she struggles to recognize, now wants Georg gone also.
He has been getting worse lately. Several weeks earlier he picked up chairs and threw them across the room. Now this, an attempt on her life.
“So, you saw him at least. Georg. How did he look?” she says.
“Placid. The hut must be a special place.”
She closes her eyes to block out an image.
“Yes,” she says. “We have not always had a great marriage.” She is thinking, remembering Berlin. It was the best time they had, but even then it wasn’t great. She can’t tell Stefano this. How to explain a relationship like that? One built on friendship and then . . . what?
“Monique used to say that love isn’t immoral in any form,” she says aloud, and then wonders why she said it. Monique used to say such things, and Rosalind would scoff. Though now she is wondering if Monique had it right, whether Rosalind could throw away her prejudice or, better still, drown it in the river. She feels the need to talk to Stefano, to tell him things.
“We met here. We grew up together. After Georg joined the army, we used to meet in Berlin and later married there. I don’t believe that he loved me as much as I loved him. I always thought he was too good for me.” She stops herself. Stefano is watching, leaving spaces for her to fill in. He makes it easy to talk and does not appear to judge.
“He was a good fighter. He won medals for bravery. He faced battle head-on. The more he left to fight, the braver he got.” She pauses. “But it was almost suicidal in a way. He would want to be at the front of every battle. I heard stories that he always put himself in the firing line. That was Georg. He thought he was invincible.”
“Of course, you miss him very much, yes? The way he was?”
She contemplates the words, swallows hard. In that moment, she is not sure that she does.
“He was a good man in a bad situation,” he continues.
Something about this comment bothers her, some deeper thought that is masked by her aching head and the trauma that has just occurred.
“I should let you rest,” he says. “You look tired. You’ve been through a lot.”
He touches her hand, and she instinctively draws it away. She is not used to intimacy, to someone being so close, to someone wanting to know so much about her.
“Please excuse me. I will take something for my headache.”
In her bedroom at the far side of the house, she reaches for her medical bag on the table beside the window. Through the sheer curtains she can see the top bedroom window of the house next door, where Monique and Erich once stayed. The sight of it sends a cold shiver up her spine. If only she could forget. If only she could start over again.
She stares inside the bag at the bottle that Erich had brought her in the event that circumstances are irreversible. She understood the message and the strength of the chemical. She had outwardly dismissed the notion, but she had kept it just the same.
Deep down she knows why. In extraordinary situations, she is capable of anything. She has been sacrificing for love that is not returned. And perhaps Erich’s way is kinder.
August 1942
Rosalind had received a letter from Monique that said she and Erich were spending a week at the river later that month. As promised, Erich had orchestrated that Georg could take the same week, which he’d already been made aware of. Rosalind applied for time off, something she rarely asked for, though she was annoyed that it was Monique who had contacted her and not Georg, annoyed that Georg had not reached out to her first.
Georg advised her later by telegram to say that he would meet Rosalind directly there. They had arranged that Georg and Rosalind would stay in her Oma’s house, and Monique and Erich in the other. Meanwhile the cousins’ grandmother took the opportunity to visit her son in Berlin, to give the two couples some “marital privacy.”
Rosalind was the first to arrive, and she wiped the dust that had gathered on the furniture at Georg’s, which had sat empty for some time, and collected fresh wildflowers and placed them in vases in both houses. There were a dozen geese and instructions from her grandmother to take care of them, to feed them the hay from the barn. Rosalind brought apricots and figs that she paid dearly for, as well as a chicken and sugar, and her grandmother had left some bread, jam, and tea for their arrival. The others were expected that evening, and Rosalind prepared a meal in advance.
Erich and Monique arrived next. Monique was dazzling in a pink summer dress, with shoestring straps, and white sandals. Her lips shone with color and her hair was cut just above her shoulders, brushed and much tamer than it used to be.
Rosalind was happy that Monique had moved away and moved on with her life, but there was a selfish motivation to remove the attention that was always on her. She did not miss the troubles that followed Monique, her diversion of Georg’s attention, and the sharing of Rosalind’s parents. She was relieved that the couple looked happy, and in a rare, unselfish way, she was happy for them, too. Had she been too hard, jealous of how easily Monique approached life, and bitter that she did not carry the same traits that made life more bearable? She felt dowdy next to Monique, her blond wispy hair pulled back sharply so that the color looked more mousy than fair. But that day she didn’t seem to care as much. Rosalind was genuinely pleased to see her cousin and had been lonely without her. They seemed to be getting on much better than they had in Berlin.
But if Rosalind had looked deeper, had not been too busy in the kitchen to examine the couple with any great scrutiny, she would have seen that there was something unsettling about their relationship. They seemed content and talkative, Erich keen to go for a swim, like Monique, but they didn’t make eye contact when they talked about their life together, and their shared experiences lacked substance. She failed to notice that Monique’s sentences stopped shorter than they used to; there were fewer descriptions and exclamations.
“Have you looked for your father?” said Rosalind.
“Yes,” said Monique. And that was all she had said, because the result was there in the shortness of the answer, and Erich had moved closer to Rosalind to discuss the weather outside, the sudden burst of heat that arrived with them on the train.
They had already begun to eat when Georg arrived. He did not arrive in uniform, not majestically like Erich in his exquisitely cut, newly issued gray jacket and hat that spelled out clearly his importance and superiority.
Georg had kissed Rosalind and swung her around just the same as when they were younger, and joy coursed through her body. She had loved him always, the feeling stronger than ever.
Georg shook hands with Erich, and Monique now had someone else to talk to, since Erich seemed, even at close quarters, to be in a separate room from everyone else. It was his way, to stay distant, to watch more than participate, and it was something Rosalind found uncomfortable. As if they were always under an examination they were unaware of.
They drank too much wine that night. With wine at least, Erich spoke more than Georg, who smoked one cigarette after another. He looked debonair using his long silver cigarette holder and waving it around casually. Monique relaxed and told about the interesting townspeople in Austria, occasionally glancing at Erich. How they mistrusted her at first but were jealous also of her handsome husband. Erich smiled briefly, but he did not look particularly impressed or buoyed by the description, since validation was something he could manage himself for the most part.
They reminisced, Monique and Georg, including Rosalind in their memories as well. Georg would put his hand on his wife’s knee occasionally. Was it possessiveness? Rosalind wondered. She hoped anyway. She wanted to be possessed by someone, to be wanted, desired, pined for.
And then it was time for bed and Monique left first, yawning as she walked away, but planning an early morning swim. Georg seemed disappointed that she was leaving so soon. Erich seemed reluctant to leave at all, much to Rosalind’s regret. She and Georg had had so little physical intimacy, and despite the rushed wedding night, she had been thinking a lot about him, about his body lying naked against her, about rubbing her hand across the taut skin on his chest.
Finally Georg said he was sleepy. Erich took the hint and left quickly. When she and Georg were at last alone in the attic bedroom, she changed into the lavender chemise he had presented to her on their wedding night. He told her the food was wonderful. She climbed into bed first, with its soft mattress that sank in the middle, and he took off his shirt and trousers, leaving on just his shorts, and climbing in also. He pulled up the sheet and rolled over to face away from her.
Rosalind lay beside him, facing his back. She traced her finger down his spine. She could see the sun line at the base of his neck, darkened from his days in the field.
In just a few minutes she heard his breathing deepen, the breaths stretching longer, his back rising and falling evenly.
He deserves much rest, she had told herself. He had just come from the front line, something they did not discuss at the dinner table. He’d had the longest journey to get there, an army truck from the field and then two trains. He was thinner, gaunt, she reflected as she lay there.
She switched off the lamp beside the bed and rolled over to spy through the window that looked across to the bedroom where Erich and Monique would be sleeping. Their light was still on. She could see their shadows on the curtains of the room on the second floor at the end of the house. The pair disappeared from view, and then the light was extinguished. She was thinking that tomorrow was a new day and Georg would be recovered from travel and that she had a lot to be grateful for. She dreamed of Monique drowning in the river, screaming for help, not as a young girl, but as she was then, in her pretty summer dress.
She woke to silence.
A shaft of moonlight streaked the bedroom furniture and the empty spaces around her. She was in the middle of the bed alone. She walked to the window to look at the house next door. Monique’s room was in darkness. Rosalind stopped to listen for sounds from Georg, but she heard nothing.
She treaded carefully down the stairs, wondering whether he’d moved to the room below, perhaps to sleep alone, and desiring some space. She took pity on him, imagining the cramped spaces where he’d likely been forced to sleep.
He was not on the lower level, and the front door was slightly ajar. She opened it farther, expecting to find Georg smoking on the front bench and staring at the wood, but she was greeted only by the coolness of the night.
She was about to try the other door to scan the backyard, when she heard a voice in the distance, much like Monique’s, the sound coming from the woods.
Out amid the trees, she glimpsed the silver beam that stretched across the river; then she veered right to the secret pathway leading to their hideaway.
She was on the narrow strip, where trees leaned inward in an attempt to take back the path, when someone loomed out of the darkness in front of her. Moonlight struck the shock of strawberry-gold hair and the
top of his sharply angled cheekbone. He was startled and stopped suddenly so they wouldn’t collide, before squeezing past her to rush away. It was only once he’d passed, in the seconds after their meeting had taken place, that she realized Georg was naked.
The past and envy and fear that had dissipated with marriage and time reared repugnantly, replaced only by the dread that there was still more to witness.
She was still standing in a state of shock and fear when Monique stepped into view, startled also by Rosalind’s appearance in the wood.
“Rosa!” she cried.
She was wearing a cream satin nightgown, which shimmered and competed with the very star that had illuminated her.
Monique was now speechless in the dark, but she turned her head slightly in the direction of the hut, to the place where the crime had been committed, before turning back to face Rosalind and reaching for Rosalind’s hands that were clutching at the air in front of her, searching for something to support her.
“Rosa, we have to talk—”
“How could you,” Rosalind whispered harshly, and bile rose in her throat.
“Rosalind—”
“Get away!” said Rosalind, who no longer wanted to see her, who turned then and ran.
“He is wrong for you,” Monique called after her.
Upstairs there was no sign of Georg. But she knew he was unlikely to return now that they had been caught. The single thing that had hung over her head for years, the fear, had finally happened. Why now? Why had he tortured her all these years?
She packed her bag upstairs, throwing everything into it hastily, except the lavender chemise she had worn for Georg, tossed to a corner of the room. Monique had disappeared to find Georg no doubt. The light in the bedroom next door was then switched on. It was sometime after two in the morning, as she walked past Erich’s house, barefoot, uncaring of her appearance at that moment, that she saw a familiar figure on the front bench.
Erich knows, she thought at the time. It was why they weren’t talking. And more importantly, he didn’t seem to care.
The Road Beyond Ruin Page 23
