Of Love and Other Wars

by Sophie Hardach

  If Max had told all this to Mrs Morningstar, she would not have destroyed the medal.

  But why was he even letting that painful thought in? It was no use to him here.

  *

  The reason why he finally decided not to tell the guards was neither pride, nor loyalty to his mother, nor shame about his father’s betrayal.

  Whenever he pictured their faces as they picked up the receiver to ring Professor Hoffnung at his study in Berlin, he saw a mocking expression that quickly turned contemptuous: Certainly, Herr Professor, we are sorry about the disturbance, Herr Professor; for their enquiries would in all likelihood be met by stern denial, surprise that they would fall for such an easy fraud on the mere basis of a shared surname, and annoyed reassurance that he did not have a son, and certainly not one who was a prisoner.

  *

  Outside the showers was a pile of jackets.

  ‘Theirs,’ said one of the men, and pointed at a high smoking chimney to their right.

  Another man in their line began to sway and weave from side to side like a drunkard. After two, three stumbling steps, he collapsed. There was a brief moment of disorder. The guards shouted, the procession paused. Max grabbed one of the jackets on the pile and shoved it under his own jacket with the triangle.

  In the evening, in his bunk, he took off his old jacket and slipped on the new one.

  He hoped the jacket had belonged to a dead man, not to a fellow inmate who would have to face his guards without a jacket.

  Shivering on the wooden planks, he waited for dawn.

  PART THREE

  1945

  When All London Sparkles

  with Illuminations

  Life Drawing

  The young woman on the top floor mentioned her husband far too often, and her ring was a cheap thing she must have bought from a tinker. Before the war, Mrs Kosinsky would not have let the room to her, but these days the choice was between fallen women and prostitutes, and the former tended to have fewer visitors.

  On the whole, the landlady had not much to reproach her for. There were occasional visits from a ‘cousin’. She always left the little boy with a friend during these visits, and Mrs Kosinsky did not like what this implied. However, on most evenings her tenant was alone with the boy and sketched him on rough packing paper. The sketches covered the walls of their room and had begun to creep out into the corridor. Mrs Kosinsky decided she would wait until the New Year before pruning the excess. She blew her nose in her apron.

  Her tenant cried breathlessly from the top of the stairs: ‘Mrs Kosinsky! I couldn’t ask you to look after him today, could I? I’ve got to go to the factory later.’

  Shouting from the top of the stairs was against the house rules, but before the landlady could point this out, little Nathan emerged on the landing. He turned round, gripped the wooden baluster with both hands and lowered himself onto the next step. When his mother tried to pick him up, he swatted at her hands and returned to his task with frowning concentration.

  Mrs Kosinsky’s heart melted even before he completed his laborious descent and raised his fat little arms. She sat him on her hip, anchored him in the crook of her elbow and blew her nose in her apron again with her free arm.

  ‘This morning they said the war was as good as over. Time for your husband to come home, I suppose?’

  Her guest threw her head back and laughed too loudly. It was a nervous tic, this shouting and laughing: Mrs Kosinsky had noticed that the more nervous and agitated she was, the louder she became.

  ‘He’d better!’

  She picked up her bag and left, but seconds later she was back and pressed one last kiss on the boy’s silky curls. She left again and came back once more, and by that time both she and Mrs Kosinsky were laughing at her infatuation, and Nathan gurgled happily because he thought it was all a game and that his mother wasn’t really leaving for the night at all.

  ‘I can’t help it!’ She shook her head, still laughing. ‘I had such a wonderful dream last night, and it’s left me in a very silly mood all day.’

  Mrs Kosinsky liked hearing about dreams, especially when they were mystical, and was disappointed when it turned out to be a fairly ordinary one of a blue sky filled with white balloons.

  ‘Barrage balloons?’

  ‘No, not at all! They were simply white balloons. One of them popped and everyone thought it would crash to the ground, but it continued to float and that was a wonderful feeling, to watch that popped balloon float. I woke up feeling like a balloon myself, and if Nathan hadn’t been there tugging at my hand, I might have floated away. And then, well, then something in my head sort of popped, too. Something I’d been thinking of for a long time suddenly made sense, and I knew exactly what I would do. I’m talking nonsense now, aren’t I? It’s like a cake that’s barely set and needs to cook a bit longer, but when it stops quivering and the needle comes out clean I’ll tell you all about it.’

  Mrs Kosinsky smiled mischievously. ‘Is it something to do with your cousin, perhaps?’

  She threw her head back again. ‘No, Mrs Kosinsky, but I’m very glad to see you’re keeping an eye on me.’

  The last sentence was uttered in a mocking tone Mrs Kosinsky knew and disliked, but she decided to forgive the peculiar Mrs Lamb for it.

  *

  She had been instructed to tuck the boy into bed upstairs and check on him only if she heard a noise. But Mrs Kosinsky had raised five children in a single room and did not believe in letting little ones sleep out of sight. She made a nest for herself on the floor and put her darling boy into her bed. If Mrs Lamb was going to tell her off in the morning, so be it.

  In the middle of the night, she heard her bedroom door open a crack. She pretended to be asleep. Mrs Lamb peered in and gazed at her sleeping child for a long time. Then she slowly closed the door.

  Mrs Kosinsky woke only once more that night. Her first, sleepily confused thought was that Mrs Lamb had kicked down the wall to fetch her son. The cold night air swept in through where the bedroom wall had been. Cursing and tripping over her long cotton nightgown, the landlady gathered up the bawling boy in her arms and ran to where the stairs used to be.

  Hardness Ten

  ‘This paper is dedicated to my father, my brothers, and all future generations of diamond-cutters in our family.’

  A Theory of Diamond-Cutting

  Esther Morningstar left Hatton Garden during one war and returned during another. The street had been destroyed but her parents still refused to move. They were frail and nervous, and Esther and her husband had agreed to live with them for a bit. Once again they were huddling together in their grief. Once again all reflecting surfaces were covered.

  The vast kitchen where Esther had stood on a lump of coal had shrunk to a damp dark cubbyhole. Ten people used to sit around that kitchen table and pray and eat and argue and celebrate. The table was still there but these days no quick little fingers folded tissue and paper envelopes for diamonds. Nor did any soot-cheeked boys look up from their grinder and dust with big bright eyes and cry: ‘Is it fine enough, Mother? Can I go out and play now? Surely it’s fine enough?’

  Outside, the grimy fog-shrouded café where merchants had tipped little mounds of diamonds onto the table and haggled and closed the deal with a ‘Mazel und Broche’ was gone. There was now a Diamond Club and a Diamond Bourse where her brothers had once dreamed of spending their days.

  For there had been one single week when the lives of all ten people around the table were not silver, not golden, but blue-white like the most expensive stones.

  Esther Adler had been offered a place at the Wizard’s lab. The Wizard! Her own mother had heard of him, and she could not even read.

  Nathan had recently married the daughter of an Antwerp diamond merchant and both Simon and Solly were engaged to daughters of equally good families. And her sisters were either about to be nicely settled or enjoyed picking their way through dozens of freshly delivered young men. They owed this great fortu
ne to the war, which brought trainloads of refugees from Antwerp. Some of them wore their entire stock in leather wallets around their waists and in the great upheaval that ensued there were rich rewards for the bold.

  Esther’s father had spent a lifetime wishing he could shut the filthy attic for good, put on a pair of gloves and wander off to a café to trade diamonds. But how could a diamond cutter with eight children put aside enough money to buy even a couple of rough stones? They tried, but every time they had saved a little, one of the children fell ill or there was a dearth of jobs and the scaife stood still and they had to use their savings to buy food.

  Then the war brought those merchants from Antwerp with their unmarried daughters and sons. At home they would never have looked at the children of a cutter, but here things were different!

  Here the Adler children were real young Englishmen and Englishwomen who knew about fog and tea-drinking.

  Here the Antwerp merchants told everyone who would listen about the glorious mansions and silver platters and mahogany desks they had left behind, but the Antwerp street vendors, beggars and shlemiels told everybody exactly the same! And when nobody listened, the Antwerp lot grabbed old Adler and his friends by their lapels, collars, beards and told them about the mahogany desks, and the London lot would shake themselves free and swear: ‘Ach! Not that tale of the mahogany desk again!’

  For in that foreign land, all refugees were the same. But a young English Jew like Nathan, fluent in the languages of all the diamond bourses of the world, who had handled so many stones that he hardly needed his loupe to tell good from bad: now there was a match.

  Three quick merchants pledged their daughters to the Adler boys. The dowries were a splinter of what they would have been in Antwerp, but still enough to set the young couples up with a little capital, enough to give them a start in the trade.

  Those blue-white days. Esther Morningstar sat down at the large empty table. Her husband was asleep and her father was asleep and her mother was asleep.

  She touched the corner of the table where Nathan had sat with his young bride. It had been Rosh Hashanah and if the girl was disappointed by what must have been a modest meal compared to the luxurious feasts of Antwerp, she did not show it. Or she did show it and Esther had polished away any hint of discord that could have stained the memory. All she remembered was the taste of apples and honeycake and her father’s sweet expectation of three fine young sons at the Diamond Club. Not one of them would have to take over the old attic. Not one of them. Esther had been the wonder girl but this, really, was her father’s greatest achievement. A maths award that came with a student’s bursary, that was all well and good, but three sons at the Diamond Bourse! Now that was something.

  Nathan had sat by the corner. Simon had sat by the window. Solly had sat where Esther was sitting now. Nathan’s young bride had tasted the honeycake and said with a little pout, at home we used to add a whole jar of preserved ginger.

  Now why did Esther have to remember that! The way the girl had wrinkled her nose. And Esther’s mother, who had never in her life tasted preserved ginger, was not entirely sure whether to take it as an insult.

  It would have been irrelevant, that tiny complaint about the lack of sophistication in her family. The years would have passed, Nathan would have grown wealthy and bought his parents a new house and new clothes. His wife would have grated his modest background into his morning porridge and over his luncheon sandwiches and into his evening stew, but Nathan was Nathan, he would have laughed it off.

  ‘. ⁠. ⁠. and if I hadn’t married you I could have married the son of the richest man in Antwerp . ⁠. ⁠.’ the wife would have said and wrinkled her nose.

  And Nathan would have laughed and run his long fingers through his beautiful thick hair and said: ‘If I hadn’t married you I would have forged emeralds for a living and I’d be rich anyway! But thanks for the dowry.’

  If the wife nagged too much he would have gone off and had a wonderful affair with an actress. The entire Adler family would have been sent free tickets to the theatre and feasted on honeycake with ginger every day of the year. They would have come to Esther’s inaugural lecture wrapped in fur coats and with a diamond on every finger, a whole row of sparkling and twinkling Adlers.

  Esther Morningstar laid her cheek on the rough wooden surface of the kitchen table.

  There was hardness three that was the hardness of a copper penny, and hardness five, which was the hardness of a steel knife, and then there was hardness ten, the hardest thing in the world, and that was a diamond.

  Nathan and Simon and Solly went to war and three telegrams came back. Their parents would have sat at this table and read them, but Esther could not remember that.

  All three had gone as soon as they could because they were like that. They were not the kind of family to wait around until they were dragged away from their dinner by the hair. She could see it in Miriam: the way she had flitted about and been ready to jump into any passing fighter plane.

  ‘Don’t forget my souvenir!’ Was that herself, Esther, that young woman with the heavy braided hair who cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted after Nathan? All the sisters lined up in the doorway for the great farewell but none of them was as proud as Esther. Such an intelligent young woman, such a fine mind who thought that working for the Wizard was the height of human existence and that going to war must be jolly good fun. ‘Don’t forget my souvenir!’ And to the other two, Simon and Solly: ‘Remember to write!’

  Oh, if only she’d never returned to Hatton Garden. Memories were spiderwebs wafting in the doorway. She had come home and walked right into them and now there was no disentangling herself.

  Remember to write, she had said, as if they were Boy Scouts.

  And was that really her, the sensible young crystallographer, who boasted to her friends and showed them photographs of her handsome brothers in uniform?

  Esther closed her eyes and reached under the table. Her fingertips found the grooves where Nathan had scratched a tally into the wood with his pocket-knife. She counted four notches and one across, and then another three. Eight. Eight what? Nathan, what did you tally up with your pocket-knife under the table, and were you pleased with the count? She had a clear memory of spying on him, a grimly concentrated boy who crouched under the table with his face close to the wood and a knife in his hand.

  She saw the same fire in Miriam the day war was declared, when she came home from her air-raid precautions round with flushed cheeks, and had she been a boy she would have signed up right away.

  My darling girl, Esther thought. If you had been a boy I would have given you the names of all three of my brothers, but how glad I was that you were a girl. In my family a baby girl was never a cause for celebration, but oh, how I celebrated you, how I cried with relief.

  And of all my many mistakes, that turned out to be the worst: because you were a girl, I thought I would have to worry about your suitors and your prospects, but not about the war. For if you had been a boy, I would rather have mutilated you than let you go to war. I would have starved you or slashed you the way some mothers did when the recruiters for the Tsar’s army came through the old country, which was what my own mother should have done too.

  What a brutal and strange idea! It came all the way from a brutal and strange continent and it did not at all fit into this cosy kitchen in London. Thank goodness no one could read Mrs Morningstar’s thoughts as she sat there with her cheek on the wooden table.

  Boys, Girls and Soldiers

  Grace was trying to light a cigarette when her detachment came under fire. The cigarette fell out of her hand and rolled along the road into a bomb crater. With the next crack of a mortar, she ducked into an abandoned house. Paul followed her.

  It would be another long night. The Germans had left their tanks and were hiding in a thatched farmhouse on the far side of a field. There was nothing for her unit to do but wait until there was a lull in the fighting and they could
tend to the wounded.

  She sat against the wall and pushed all ten fingers hard into the skin on her forehead. Very slowly she drew them across her eyebrows towards her ears. It was a trick she had developed over the years. Somehow it concentrated all the sensations in her body into that one movement. It helped her suppress all those other urges, especially the one to jump to her feet and run.

  Paul had his own trick. He interlaced his fingers and squeezed them hard. Sometimes she wondered whether he was praying, but she never quite dared to ask. It was one of the things they never talked about. Like the fact that he carried a knife – for self-defence he said – and she did not. Like the fact that she had not heard from Max in years, had not the slightest proof that he might be alive, and yet looked for him in every godforsaken village they passed, in every convoy of refugees, in every hole and ditch.

  The fighting went on for an hour or so. When it stopped, she peered through the window into the darkness. To the right was the farmhouse, silent and still in the distance. To the left was the road with the empty German tanks.

  Somewhere far away, a wounded soldier was screaming for help.

  She strained to make out the words. They sounded German. A muffled, pained appeal.

  She listened harder. Not all that far away, perhaps. Strangely muffled, but closer than she had thought.

  Far too close to come from the farmhouse.

  She looked at the tanks again.

  That was it: some poor devil had been left in there. Or perhaps he had been hit while running away from his tank, and crawled back into it for shelter. Either way, he was in there.

  She tiptoed over to Paul, who was pressing his interlaced fingers from red to white to red again. The screaming became louder, delirious: ‘Hilfe . ⁠. ⁠.’

  ‘There’s a chap trapped in one of the tanks,’ she whispered.