One Last Summer (2007) (22 page)

He said they took pride in their work at Grunwaldsee because they wanted to repay my kindness for saving their lives by giving them food and allowing them to live on the estate. But he also added that none of them could see how mending my bridles and saddles could possibly help the Reich’s war effort, reminding me that the prisoners are Russians and enemy soldiers first, and workers second.

He told me that they had heard me playing the music he had written out for me, and it brought them great pleasure as well terrible homesickness. I thought that he had composed the music, but he laughed and said he wasn’t that talented. It was written by a Russian called Shostakovich.

Long after we finished looking at the tack, we continued to sit and talk about music, art, literature, the concerts we had heard and played in together in Moscow. I am amazed by how many Russian composers I haven’t heard of besides Shostakovich. But then we were only allowed to study German composers in school and play German pieces in the Hitler Youth orchestra.

Alexander misses his violin and cello. I wish I could loan him ours, but the guards would hear him play and then there would be trouble.

The second drawing room that we used as a music room is rarely visited now. The piano is shrouded for most of the time, the instruments packed away in their cases. I have little time to play the piano other than on my weekly visits to Bergensee and at Christmas. All that studying and time Alexander and I spent practising come to nothing. It seems a terrible waste.

We talked about our families. Alexander married a girl called Zoya, who was in the orchestra with us in 1939. I can only just remember the name; I cannot picture her at all. Alexander said it was a typical war wedding; they barely knew one another but felt they had to make the gesture in case one or both of them were killed. A bit like Claus and me. They only had one week together before his unit was ordered into Poland.

Zoya wrote to tell him she was going to have his child, but, as he hasn’t heard from her or seen her since Christmas 1939, he doesn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl. He confided that sometimes he even forgets that he is married. I can understand that. I find it easy not to think about Claus in between his leaves.

Alexander has seen Erich in the yard and thinks his child must be about the same age. I do so hope that he finds his family after the war. He was so easy to talk to that, for a short while, I managed to forget my problems with the estate, Claus and even the war. Alexander asked me to call him Sascha. I remember his parents and Masha calling him that when I stayed with them in their Moscow apartment.

Whenever I think of Papa and Paul, and recall Wilhelm telling me how Paul died, I feel as though my heart is breaking. How much worse it must be for Sascha not knowing whether his wife, child, parents or sister are alive. Not hearing one word, one single word, in over four years. He said his unit had received very little mail even before they were captured.

I tried to hearten him by telling him that it looks as though the Russians are driving us out of the Soviet Union. I felt dreadfully disloyal for saying it, especially as Paul and Manfred died there. But when I talked to Sascha I couldn’t help wondering what we are doing in his country, for all the Führer’s insistence that we Germans need Lebensraum. Why ship ethnic Germans out of the East after they have lived there for generations and move them into Poland? And what right have we Germans to appropriate Polish and Russian territory, houses, land and crops that were never ours in the first place?

Neither of us is naive enough to think that there will be a quick or easy end to this war. Alexander said that, as he was captured, he could think of no better prison than Grunwaldsee and no kinder warden than myself.

He is a captain, the same rank as Wilhelm – and Paul when he was killed. He has only told his lieutenant that he knows me and, as they are old school friends, he assured me that Leon Trepov can be trusted, so if I can’t speak to him directly, I can always pass on a message.

I couldn’t believe it when I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight. I can’t remember another evening that passed so quickly.

I promised to meet Sascha again tomorrow evening. I will take some leather oil with me in case the guards get suspicious, although in this cold weather they lock the prisoners into the stable loft early and watch the outside steps and door from the comfort of the lodge window.

It is crazy. Here we are in the middle of a war and I cannot sleep for thinking about a meeting that I have arranged with one of the enemy. The enemy! It is easy to think of foreigners as such when you don’t know them. Even when we invaded Russia, I only spared a quick thought for Masha, Sascha and their parents. Now I cannot bear the thought that one day he and Wilhelm might face one another in battle.

Chapter Twelve

THURSDAY, 30 MARCH 1944

The papers and the radio are full of photographs and stories of our troops marching into Hungary, but the casualties continue to pour through on the trains and it is obvious that there is heavy fighting in Russia. Every day I thank God that Wilhelm isn’t there – and Claus, too.

The spring thaw has finally come. There is very little snow left, and every tree and bush is full of buds. We, or rather the Russians, have begun ploughing the fields. I still go to the tack room nearly every evening, but now I always use the door that leads into it from Papa’s study.

I keep the door locked except when I actually use it. The fat guard looked into the tack room one day when I was fetching Elise’s saddle and noticed the door. He asked me what was behind it. I told him it was an old entrance to the servants’ quarters but the key had been lost years ago. Fortunately, he believed me. Thank God for a stupid man.

Although I cannot be seen from the lodge or the yard, I go to the tack room just after nine o’clock when the guards switch on the radio and get out their schnapps bottles. Mama, the children and Irena are always in bed by then. Martha, Brunon and Marius are upstairs in their rooms, and Minna stays in Mama’s room. She sleeps there now in case Mama wakes in the night and goes wandering again. They are all too busy to notice what I’m doing, and no one except me and the Russians know that Sascha and I spend our evenings together.

Once the lamp is lit, the hatch shut and the doors locked, I feel as though Sascha and I are closed into our own private world. We wrap up in horse blankets and sit and talk about anything and everything – except the war.

It is strange how many things we have in common: music; a love of literature; art; horses; and the countryside. Although Sascha was brought up in Moscow, his father had a country house and he learned to ride there.

He has described the woods and fields around his father’s dacha so well,

I feel as though I have visited them. A few weeks ago I smuggled a couple of sketch pads, some pencils and charcoal into the tack room. Sascha is a brilliant artist. He drew a portrait of me and a sketch of Grunwaldsee. I was reasonable at art at school but I gave it up to concentrate on music. Sascha said it was a mistake and he is teaching me basic drawing techniques. He says I am improving, but I think he is only being kind.

Yesterday, after I had drawn a passable portrait of Elise, he kissed me only on the cheek but I shuddered. He apologized. I didn’t mean to, but I began to tell him about my marriage to Claus and how much I hate married life, and once I started talking I couldn’t stop. Afterwards I felt very foolish, but Sascha was not at all embarrassed, only kind and understanding. He said it is easy for a man to frighten his bride and that love, like everything else that is worth having in life, has to be worked for.

Sascha is sensitive, gentle and sympathetic; the exact opposite of Claus, who is always stern, impatient and exacting. When I lay in bed last night I began to wonder what it would be like to be married to him; to live and work beside him; to sit and talk to him every evening in the drawing room about art and poetry and music; to eat all my meals with him; and to sleep with him. Perhaps even make love with him the way Irena does with Wilhelm.

I have always been careful with this diary, now I am doubly careful. Should anyone read it, I would be in such trouble. Quite apart from some of the things I have written that border on treason, Sascha and I would certainly be shot.

Charlotte looked up from the page. Dawn had broken, and she hadn’t noticed. The light had grown in the room until it outshone the bedside light. She hadn’t meant to read through the night, but there was so much that she had forgotten. Not events, but sights, sounds; the texture of Sascha’s skin beneath her fingertips; how he had smelled of rain, pine woods, the clean outdoors and wood smoke from the stove in the loft.

She recalled the bitter struggle she’d had with her conscience from the earliest days of their friendship. She couldn’t forget the sacred vows she had exchanged with Claus in Grunwaldsee church on their wedding day. But the sense of guilt that had tormented her hadn’t prevented her from stealing away as often as she could to spend time with Sascha.

That evening, when Sascha had kissed her, lightly and chastely on the cheek, had marked a turning point in their relationship. She believed that Sascha had meant it as a friendly kiss, a recognition and reward for work well done. But from that moment, things happened between them that she had never dared commit to her diary. Yet every second they had shared remained etched indelibly into her memory. Secret treasures she had clung to, dwelt on and relived during the most wretched times in her life.

Those memories had both sustained her and caused her anguish for over sixty years. They had given her the strength to go on when she had nothing and no one to live for. And they had given rise to her bleakest despair when she had doubted Sascha’s motives for befriending her. Had he sought simply to gain food and warmth from her that would enable him and his men to survive? Had he ever truly loved her as she had him? Were her memories of Sascha and their love real, or was she, like so many elderly people, remembering what had never been?

Had the most momentous evening of her life meant anything to Sascha? Had he clung to it, cherished it and relived it time and again afterwards, as she had – and still did?

The day had been cold and fresh, but it had lost its harsh winter bite. She had smuggled a wooden box stuffed with hay into her father’s study. Inside was unimaginable luxury: a small pot of real coffee, made with beans Mama von Letteberg had sent from Berlin along with a few other delicacies. She had stolen a few spoonfuls of the coffee and two truffle chocolates from the parcel before sharing out the rest of the contents between her own and Brunon’s family.

Sascha had been waiting for her. As soon as she’d pushed the bolts home in the tack room doors, he’d dropped down through the hatch, closing it behind him. He’d landed lightly on the balls of his feet, sniffed and said, ‘I don’t believe it.’

She proudly opened the box, showed him the contents and said, ‘Believe it.’

She laid a lace tablecloth over a wooden crate, set out two porcelain cups and a silver jug of cream. Not knowing if he took sugar, she’d brought the honey pot and a porcelain dish for the truffles. When she’d finished setting out the feast she’d felt embarrassed, as if she were a child playing house.

He caught her hand, lifted it to his lips and said, ‘Thank you. I feel almost human again.’

Even now she didn’t know why she’d said it, but she repeated automatically without thinking, ‘As opposed to subhuman.’

He gazed into her eyes, and she’d felt as though he were looking into her soul. ‘Is that how you think of me and Russians, Charlotte?’

‘Never,’ she had protested. ‘You, Masha, your family – you are no different from us.’

‘We were – are,’ he contradicted. ‘But we didn’t realize it. It takes a special kind of sadist to turn prisoners of war into a field and tell them to graze like cattle. And an even greater one to point a flamethrower at a wooden house and shoot children when they run out.’

Her blood had run cold. Then from somewhere she had summoned the courage to tell him what Wilhelm had said, and ask if he knew what her brother had meant by ‘behind the curtain of lies’.

It was just as well that coffee had been almost impossible to get hold of for another five or six years, because, for a long time afterwards, the smell had catapulted her back into the tack room. And brought with it all the paralyzing horror she’d felt while listening to Sascha recite lists of atrocities that the German military had carried out on the defenceless civilians in his homeland.

He told her about Reich soldiers who had shot children while they sat at their school desks. The platoons of Wehrmacht, as well as SS, that had hung and shot civilians, women as well as men, for no fathomable reason; the organized ‘actions’ that had wiped out entire towns and villages. He had talked to survivors who had hidden and watched the German death squads that roamed the countryside behind German lines, rounding up men, women and children – Russians, Jews, partisans – before taking them to the forest, making them dig their own graves and shooting them.

She began to cry long before he finished. Silent tears that had run cold down her face. A shame had been born in her that night, shame that German soldiers could do such things, and she had finally understood what Wilhelm had been unable to tell her. It was one thing for a soldier to fight in battle – quite another to kill unarmed civilians and children no older than Erich, Marianna and Karoline.

When Sascha finished talking he had kissed away her tears. She had locked her arms tightly around his neck and kissed him back. She had wanted to prove that she considered him her equal, that she wasn’t like those among her countrymen who murdered indiscriminately. But most of all, she wanted to thank him for telling her the truth. A truth not even her brother had been able to confide. Only she hadn’t stopped at kissing.

And afterwards, when she had lain naked in Sascha’s arms, rejoicing that at last she knew – really knew – what love between a man and a woman could be like, she wouldn’t have cared if the guards had dragged her out into the yard and shot her like a dog. Because, for the first time in her life, she had found and known perfect love – and happiness.

WEDNESDAY, 7 JUNE 1944

Spring has given way to warm summer. The most beautiful I have ever known. For the last few months we have been ploughing, planting and hoeing from dawn to dusk, and afterwards ... afterwards I have been too happy to write. But now it is one o’clock in the morning. Everyone and everything at Grunwaldsee is asleep, my window is open to the still, warm night air, and I feel more alive than I ever thought possible. At one with the stars, the moon, the trees, the perfumed flowers – all of the natural life around me.

The darkness is so quiet, so peaceful, I feel I have only to hold my breath and listen hard to hear Sascha’s heart beating. Which is foolish, considering the distance between the stable loft and my bedroom.

If only Sascha could move freely about the house and grounds, sit with me at the table, be with me every minute of every day, sleep with me, here, in this room, watch as I write this, but, as Papa used to say every time Greta asked him for something that was not in his power to give her, ‘Don’t cry for the moon.’

Like every child, I have to learn to be content with the blessings I have, instead of longing for the impossible.

I suspect that the war is going badly for Germany, but, along with everyone else, I dare not voice my fears lest someone accuse me of being unpatriotic. We know there is fierce fighting in Russia and Italy, because Marius has been conscripted for postal duty and he told us that hundreds of telegrams are being delivered to the families of the boys and men who are serving there. I never knew there was so much black cloth to be bought in Allenstein.

Irena and I went to have coffee and cakes – acorn coffee and honey cakes – with her mother this afternoon. It was a fundraiser for the Red Cross. Because we have no petrol for the cars, I asked Brunon to harness the cart.

The children thought it quite an adventure to drive into town in it. We passed the shuttered and barred synagogue, and I remembered the day we saw Georg and the SS driving Ruth, Emilia and the Jewish children out of the building and kicking the old Rabbi until he bled.  Is there a chance that Ruth or Emilia will be able to return some day? I do hope so, perhaps then I may have a chance to tell them how sorry I am for being such a coward and doing nothing to help them.

Georg’s mother was at the coffee afternoon. Georg is safe, posted somewhere in Poland, on ‘special duties’ where he has access to all kinds of goods that are in short supply. I wondered what Georg’s ‘special duties’ could be. Perhaps he is beating more old men and mistreating more defenceless children and girls? Or running one of
t
he dreadful camps, like Dachau, that people whisper about? Whatever those duties are, I dared not ask Georg’s mother about them. It wouldn’t have been polite to start an argument in Frau Adolf’s house.

Frau Adolf had invited twenty women to help her raise funds, and, of the twenty, sixteen of us had lost a son, husband or brother. It was meant to be a pleasant occasion, but inevitably the talk turned to the war, and although no one actually asked the question, I knew that everyone was wondering: how many more sacrifices will be required of us before we can live in peace again?

Irena was very quiet on the journey back. She held her two little girls close to her and had the faraway look in her eyes that told me she was thinking of Wilhelm, Manfred and Paul. But when we reached home, there was the greatest happiness waiting for her. Wilhelm was there!

His colonel had urgent business in East Prussia. He flew into a secret destination from Berlin this morning and brought Wilhelm along as his aide. He will pick Wilhelm up at Grunwaldsee in two days. I am already making plans to give Wilhelm’s colonel an excellent ‘thank you’ dinner when he arrives.

While Wilhelm and Irena played with the children and put them to bed, Martha and I went down to the summerhouse and prepared it for them. I took some food, two of Martha’s bottles of homemade strawberry wine and what was left of a bottle of brandy Claus had brought at Christmas. The wine cellar has been empty for months, and even the cupboard is depleted, as we have not been able to lay down any wine since the start of the war. I promised Irena that I would look after the girls if they woke in the night, although she knows full well they never do, and Martha and I will take care of them in the morning and give them breakfast, so she and Wilhelm can make the most of their unexpected holiday.

Before they walked down to the summerhouse, Wilhelm handed me a duty letter from Claus. I could tell from the way he looked at me that he knows something is very wrong between us.

After they left, I checked on Mama and the children. Sascha and I have to be much more careful now that the evenings are light. The guards and the land army girls often go for walks together and cross the yard at all hours. I am terrified that they will hear Sascha and me talking. But tonight was easy. I went to the barn to check where the guards were, and I saw three of the land army girls drinking schnapps in the lodge with them. They were singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, so I knew they were well away. I went straight to Papa’s study and from there to the tack room.