by Andie Newton
‘Ju… Julia.’ She panted, barely able to say her name.
Auntie butterflied Julia’s legs open, and then took her feet and placed them on some boxes to push against. ‘How long have you been in labour?’
‘Hours.’ Auntie whipped her head around, her eyes carving into mine.
‘Looks it,’ she said. ‘You’re ripping at the sides.’
‘I thought the hole was big enough—’
‘Hand me my bag!’ Auntie said.
I used the side of my foot to slide the midwife’s bag closer to my aunt, and then took a step back. Auntie reached in and pulled out something that looked like silver serving tongs, along with some razor blades and two small metal flasks, which she neatly arranged on a sheet of white canvas.
‘Get behind Julia, Ella. Put your back in the corner and cradle her in your legs.’ Auntie pointed to the wall with her head as she rubbed the tongs with a grey coverlet. I manoeuvred myself into the crook of the wall and let Julia lean into me so that my legs would support her girth.
‘What are you going to do with those tongs?’
Auntie looked at me, still rubbing the tongs. ‘These are not tongs, Ella. These are forceps. We’re going to have to pull it out.’ Auntie took a ball of cotton from the bag, squeezed liquid from one of the bottles onto it and then tossed it to me. ‘When I say so, cover her nose with that cotton.’
With a shaking hand I brushed the hair out of my face, nodding.
Auntie dropped her tense shoulders and sighed. ‘Damn it, Sascha.’
‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘Shh. I don’t want to hear it,’ she said. ‘Let’s just deliver this baby, shall we?’
‘All right, Auntie.’ I pulled my uniform tie off and threw it, loosening the collar of my sweat-soaked shirt.
Auntie picked up the other bottle and squirted liquid between Julia’s legs, then she reached for a razor blade. ‘All right, sweetie, this is going to pinch a little.’ Auntie held the blade to Julia’s bottom then motioned with two quick swipes. A squirt of blood hit my shoe and Julia whimpered.
‘I’ve got the head!’ Auntie shouted.
Julia’s whimper escalated into a screaming cry; it curdled and seeped from her pores as if she were being pierced with a jagged knife. I prayed, making promises to Christ I wasn’t sure if I could keep. Auntie, on the other hand, rooted as if she was leading a cheer.
‘Come on, girl, you’ve got it. You’ve got it. Push!’
The basement warmed with a heavy smell of iron as Julia bore down with gritted teeth. Her face ballooned red, and the veins in her eyes spidered into feathered lines. Then she gasped for air as if she’d been drowning.
‘Shit!’ Auntie looked at the cotton ball cupped in my hand and shouted. ‘Now, Sascha!’ She grasped the forceps with both hands and dug them deep into Julia’s vagina, who turned instantly limp and quiet the moment I put the cotton to her nose.
Auntie’s arms disappeared, and her eyes searched the open air. She wiped sweat from her face with her sleeve, and lipstick smeared across her cheek. Then her clip snapped from her head and her braided bun unravelled down her back. She knelt, face puckering, groaning and pulling, before falling backward with a crying baby in her arms.
‘It’s a girl!’
Auntie’s face gleamed as she cradled the baby and gazed deep into her infant eyes, weeping. ‘Oh, dear God. Dear, sweet God…’
*
Auntie swaddled the baby in a thin white blanket she had tucked in her midwife’s bag. I put the pillow under Julia’s head and lay her gently on the ground.
‘Take the baby, Sascha,’ Auntie said, resting her in my arms. ‘I need to sew Julia up before she wakes.’ Blood that had mixed with a strange gelatinous fluid soaked into Auntie’s stockings. She handled a bloody balloon that came out of Julia after the baby. ‘This is normal.’
‘But Auntie… your stockings.’
‘I’ll live,’ she said. ‘Birthing is a dirty job, Sascha.’
‘Yes, it is.’ The basement had soured with an odorous smell, and I felt nauseous, wondering why the hell anyone would get pregnant after seeing what it took to bring a baby into the world. ‘Will Julia be all right?’
Auntie looked through the eye of a sharp needle and threaded it with a thick string. ‘She will be once I’m done with her.’ She looked at the baby and smiled upon her as if she were her own. ‘You did the right thing, Sascha. That baby would’ve died if you hadn’t got me. Maybe even both of them.’
The midnight hour slipped into morning. Julia had woken up and Auntie helped her latch the baby to her breast. The two shared stories about motherhood and birthing. Auntie talked about my delivery as if I had come out of her, describing the labour my mother went through in great detail. Julia nodded periodically and cuddled her infant tightly in her arms as I mopped the floor. Neither of them saw me gagging into my sleeve when I squeezed the water out, or when I carried the bucket out of the basement.
The stories ended when my aunt asked her where she was headed.
Julia’s speech was slow, but smooth. ‘To France, the rest of my family is already there.’
Auntie nodded and petted the baby’s head, and I wondered if she thought I’d tell Julia she was a member of the Party. But it was hard to tell after the delivery, with the way Auntie smiled at Julia and looked lovingly at her baby.
‘I trust you’ve got her transport all arranged, Sascha?’
‘Yes,’ I said, setting down the mop.
A second later a loud screech echoed through the basement. The trapdoor that connected the basement to the abandoned beer cellar next door shuddered, and its pin hook swayed. It was the same sound Claudia and I had heard when we saw the mouse, only louder, more ominous—a sound caused by a person.
Auntie’s eyes bugged from her head.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Sascha, how long have you been doing this?’
I couldn’t take my eyes off the trapdoor. Auntie grabbed my arm and shook it, trying to get me to answer her. ‘Since October,’ I blurted.
‘This is terrible,’ Auntie said under the cover of one hand. ‘The Kunstbunker, they heard everything.’
Julia looked very worried. She pushed the baby into her chest and attempted to stand, rolling to her side, using a wooden crate for support. My aunt sat with her legs folded underneath her body, staring at the trapdoor and its shaking pin hook.
‘Tante Bridget?’ My voice rattled as I realized she knew something I didn’t. I put a hand under her chin and her head swung heavy toward me, her eyes darkening like an old lady’s.
Julia scooted along the wall, getting as far away from the trapdoor as she could. The hinges jiggled loose, and then the bolts connecting it to the wall started to unscrew. One of them flopped out of its hole and tinkled its way across the floor.
‘In the shop… in the shop.’ My aunt flicked her fingers toward the basement door. Julia waddled up the steps, a soaked women’s napkin bulging between her legs. But I couldn’t move. My feet were as heavy as lead weights. ‘Now,’ Auntie said in a shouted whisper.
I stared wondrously at the trapdoor as it shook free from its bindings. Auntie boxed my shoulders with her hands, turned me around and pushed me up the steps and into the corridor. She shut the basement door, throwing her weight against it as she turned over all three of its steely-barred locks. Then she took two steps back and folded her arms tightly across her chest.
The front door opened, and terror streaked across Auntie’s face when she saw Geb walking toward us, a boy she’d never seen. Julia stepped backward, and my aunt held onto her arm, protecting her and the baby.
‘Sascha?’ he said, and my aunt relaxed into the wall when he said my name.
There was a loud clang, as if the trapdoor had been completely unhinged and thrown to the ground. The knob on the basement door turned back-and-forth. Then loud thuds slammed up against it, the kind of sound only a body can make. My aunt whimpered as she covered her mouth. She reached for me
, gripping my arm forcefully, but then an eerie silence followed—whoever was on the other side of that door had left.
Geb pulled me into a dark corner of the shop to talk. ‘What’s going—’
I threw my arms around his neck without thinking. ‘Geb,’ I said, ‘thank God you’re here!’ He hugged me back, and I squeezed a little tighter.
‘What’s going on?’ His eyes rolled up and down my aunt from afar, as if he wasn’t sure what to make of her, or what had just happened with the pounding door.
I gulped. There was so much to tell him and almost no time. ‘You need to go,’ I said. ‘The girl and her baby.’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ he said. ‘Did you hear about Hans?’
I nodded, closing my eyes briefly. ‘I did.’
‘Then you must know we aren’t safe tonight.’
Julia’s baby yelped a hungry cry, and she tried to soothe her with words of hope and love, telling the little one that she was safe in her arms. Auntie dashed into her office and grabbed the sack of clothes she had left near her desk. ‘I bought these the other day, you’ll shrink into them.’ She looked at Julia’s birth-stained clothes and pulled out a clean skirt. ‘But you should wear this one now.’
‘I can’t leave,’ I said to Geb.
‘But—’
‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine here. Take her out the back door into the alley.’
Geb let go of me completely and went to leave with Julia. My aunt paced the corridor, two dark lines carved between her eyebrows, fingers pressed against her lips. The back door swung open and my aunt’s hand reached out for the baby’s head as Julia and Geb slipped through. ‘Be safe,’ she said.
I put my back against the wall and slid to the floor. ‘What’s the Kunstbunker?’ My eyes fluttered to a close as I spoke but then sprung back open.
Auntie leaned against the opposite wall, put her hand to her forehead and breathed heavily like she had a fever. Then she flopped to the floor like a half-cooked piece of bacon, one hand holding her bangs back, the other searching the ground, trying to catch her wilting body. The youthful glow she had always maintained faded from her face and gave way to the middle-aged woman she always had been. For once, she actually looked her age.
‘They turned the beer cellar next door into an art bunker. That’s why I have been closing the shop and opening late. They’ve been using the passageway. Mayor Liebel, the head of our local Nazi Party, and Herr Coburg came to me last October, asked me to help with the art effort… the Kunstbunker. The Führer would never have approved, hiding the city’s art in a bunker implies failure, as if we expect to be bombed, so we’ve been doing it in secret. Paintings from Dürer, sculptures from Veit Stoss… all of them… all of them are down there.’
‘That can’t be,’ I said. ‘That cellar is a dank cave. Abandoned for a reason. The mould on the walls must be centimetres thick, the air, hazardous, the ground, wet!’ As I talked I realized what I had been saying. The cellar had a road-facing, larger-than-life medieval red door, with obtrusive claw-like brass hinges you could see from both ends of the street. The location was so obvious and conspicuous, next door to an antiques shop notorious for its art selections and deliveries, it was perfect. Hidden in plain sight.
‘It’s been redesigned… fitted with the latest technology, venting systems are in place.’
My aunt talked as if she had seen these systems herself. I was just relieved and surprised my Jews were never caught. I shuddered to think how many times I had Jews hidden in the basement with Nazis on the other side of the trapdoor working away in the Kunstbunker. I should have been more careful.
Minutes passed sitting in silence. Then my aunt cried into the crook of her arm, hiding her eyes which were gushing with tears, and the painful realization of what I had to do hit me square in the chest. A deaf man could’ve heard Julia’s screams. As to how many Nazis were in the Kunstbunker at the time, listening, deciphering, and wondering… only a fool would stay to find out. Tears welled in my eyes.
‘You can go to Munich—’
‘And do what, Auntie?’ I cried. ‘I’ve only ever been a shop girl.’
Auntie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘The blue rose, Sascha,’ she said, and I looked up. ‘Remember when you sold that painting? Nobody wanted a blue rose, but you made the woman see the rose for what it wasn’t, and she bought it. You’ll have to reinvent yourself, create a story that sells—like you did with the blue rose.’
‘How?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know—get a job, perhaps university…’ She rambled on about all the things I could do on my own. ‘A good shop girl can make people believe anything.’ She looked at me, her eyes red and swollen. ‘One thing is for certain. You’ll need some different clothes. That Youth League uniform doesn’t fit you. I’m not sure if it ever did.’
Auntie crawled toward me for a hug: the smell of 4711. Its scent was sweeter on her than it had been in the past, different. I held the odour with a deep breath, my face buried in the hollow of her neck. When I felt her tears fall on my face, I realized how selfish I had been: I had put my aunt’s life at risk. The shop was hers; the Gestapo could easily arrest her for what I had done. And for the first time I understood what Claudia meant when she said hiding Jews in the basement was different to pinning wigs into her hair. The dangers—the consequences for what I had done suddenly felt very real.
‘I’m sorry, Auntie,’ I said, whimpering. ‘I should have thought things through. If something happens to you because of what I’ve done—’
‘Don’t think about it, Sascha. If you do, you may not survive.’
‘How long do you think I’ll have to be gone? A week… a month?’
Auntie shook her head. ‘I don’t know—just wait for my word. Don’t come back here without it.’ I worried about so many things, and now I started to worry about Claudia. She’d come looking for me, and I wouldn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
‘Will you tell Claudia?’
Auntie sank down low to the floor when I said her name, and I thought if she didn’t know Claudia had something to do with the basement she sure as hell knew now.
‘Will you tell her where I’ve gone?’ I tugged on her arm, trying to get her to look at me in the eye. ‘I beg you, Auntie. Will you tell her?’
She stared into the air before flicking her eyes downward as if it were a nod.
*
I left for Munich at dawn. Auntie took cash from her register and packed me a rucksack. ‘Don’t stop along the way. Promise me,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘You can make the seven o’clock train if you head straight there.’ She took a book from a secret drawer in her desk, blew on the cover and then stuffed it in my rucksack with a tin of caramel candies for the trip.
‘A book… candy?’ I said. ‘Auntie…’
‘These are things a traveller would have. You don’t want to look suspicious.’ She handed me a street map of Munich with my cousin’s address written in black ink across the front. We hugged again, only this time it was quick, and then she rushed me out the back door into the alley.
The morning sun oozed dully into the street as I left, walking on from Auntie’s shop to the train station, hoping to God that the Reich wouldn’t make the connection between Wilhelm and Claudia. And then there it was: Verräters Gasse Prison flanking the south tracks as if watching me walk up with my rucksack.
A blast of firing guns erupted from the prison’s courtyard. Pop! Pop! Pop!
I paused, wiped a gush of tears from my swollen eyes, and then kept walking.
11
June
Munich
Within a week I found a cheap flat in student housing near my oldest cousin, Joseph. I was told I was lucky to have got a place in the Marienplatz, that it was considered the heart of the town. I didn’t know anything about that; all I knew was that the Marienplatz was old—hundreds of years by the looks of its cobblestones—and had a turn-of-the-century glockenspie
l with forty-three chiming bells.
I was deep in a dream when I heard a knock on my door. Not just any kind of knock, but the thunderous kind made from a closed fist.
Bang, Bang, Bang—
I shot straight out of bed, my heart thumping. Gestapo! My eyes were still adjusting to the light when I remembered I was safe in Munich.
‘It’s Alex! Your cousin.’
As soon as I heard his voice I collapsed back onto my bed. ‘Go away,’ I groaned, pulling the sheets over my head.
‘It’s nearly noon!’ he barked.
‘So what if it is?’
‘Meet me at the Ratskeller in half an hour. I’m demanding it.’
What gall my cousin had, I thought, yelling at me as if I were a child. ‘Maybe if you’d asked me nicely I would.’
The corridor went quiet, and I started to wonder if he had left. I sat up, thinking he really did leave, but then he piped up again.
‘Ella.’ He was still far too loud, but quiet for him. ‘Please meet me at the Ratskeller. I want to talk to you. This is the fifth time I’ve asked.’
‘Fine!’ I realized that the only way to get rid of him was to meet him. I wasn’t going to dress up. ‘I’ll meet you, but only since you said please.’
He stomped away, my door rattling from the thud of his feet as he walked back down the corridor.
Ugh!
*
The Ratskeller was a fifty-year-old brick beer hall shaped like a fat L. Students sat in the narrow part, their books sprawled out on the tables. Members of the Nazi Party Student’s League sat in the back of the building nearest to the taps, but when they felt like it, they sat near the entrance which pushed the students out of their seats to stand along the brick wall.
Alex was waiting for me at a small table near the rose-coloured windows that bordered the square. He wore a Nazi Party uniform, the creases from its packing twine still pressed into the fabric, and a bright red swastika cuffband around his arm. The colour against his skin did nothing for his light complexion. If anything, it made his moles look a little darker.
