One Last Summer (2007) (31 page)

She laid the flowers, one bunch below the family vault, the others below the two plaques.

‘I intended one for Mama, one for my daughter, the other for Minna. I didn’t expect to find a memorial to Wilhelm.’

‘I know his body isn’t here, but it seemed right to place his name below Paul’s.’

‘Very right.’ She allowed Marius to help her to her feet. ‘I discovered after the war that the bodies of those executed for involvement in the von Stauffenberg plot were burned and their ashes scattered to the winds.’

‘I read that somewhere, too.’ He led her to a pew and they sat down.

‘As if the torture wasn’t enough, they humiliated the conspirators at their trials. Made them wear old, civilian clothes, took away their belts, braces and shoelaces and forced them to snap to attention and salute, so their trousers fell down.’

‘How do you think your brother would have felt if he’d known you’d still be tormenting yourself with thoughts of his death after all this time, Fräulein Charlotte? He was a brave young man, and so happy with his wife and family. He had purpose after he began to work for Colonel von Stauffenberg. He died doing what he knew was right. For him there was no compromise, no other way.’

‘I try to remember the good times, Marius, but it’s not always easy. Especially here. Seeing the house again, and these memorials, has brought everything back. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you with my grief. But for these,’ she looked at the plaques again, ‘I thank you.’

‘I know it is presumptuous of me, but I think of your brothers as my friends rather than the sons of my family’s employer.’

‘Had Paul lived, he would have been your brother-in-law.’ She rose to her feet.

They left the cool interior of the church and walked back out into the sunlight. She paused in front of a headstone set just inside the churchyard wall, green with moss and weathered with age. ‘Do you think Maria would like your irises?’

‘I’m sure she would.’

She set the bunch on Maria’s grave. ‘She was so young.’

‘You heard about my father?’ He offered her his arm and she took it.

‘I saw his name on a list of the soldiers who died defending Königsberg.’

‘As you see, we put his name on Maria’s headstone.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There’s so much death here. I think it’s time to go to the house. You will stay for afternoon coffee?’

‘I should get back to the hotel. Laura doesn’t know where I am.’

‘She’s riding with Brunon. They will have to return to the stables, and Jadwiga won’t let her leave without eating or drinking something.’

She hesitated and looked back at the church, preoccupied with the one question she hadn’t found the strength to ask – yet.

‘Thank you, Marius, coffee would be lovely.’ Charlotte watched Marius’s wife walk away from them across the lawn with an empty tray. ‘I feel as though I’ve driven Jadwiga away.’

‘More of the new owner’s furniture is about to be delivered to the main house. He’s left explicit instructions with the firm transporting it as to where it is to go – and I don’t doubt he’ll be on hand to oversee it himself – but you know women, especially Polish ones.’ Marius shrugged. ‘Anything domestic and they have to check and double-check for dirt beforehand, especially in the places where heavy pieces will be placed.’

‘So she’s not just being tactful in leaving us alone.’

‘That, too.’ Marius refilled their coffee cups without asking Charlotte if she wanted any more.

Charlotte sat back in the wooden chair that had replaced the antique ironwork garden furniture her family had used. ‘I never thought I’d sit here again.’ She glanced up at the arbour that had been planned and planted when the house had been built. The wooden stems of the wisteria and clematis that climbed the pergola were thicker than she remembered, the flowers less abundant. She wondered if the changes were the result of the plants’ age or her memory playing tricks.

‘I’ve had to cut a few pieces of wood into the framework here and there. But it is still fairly sound, considering it’s probably close to three hundred years old.’

‘You’ve done a good job, Marius,’ she complimented. ‘I can’t see any joins.’

‘Because I hid them by training the plants around them.’ He offered her a small tray and a plate. ‘You must eat one of Jadwiga’s strawberry tarts. If you don’t, she’ll take it as an insult to her baking.’

‘Thank you.’ Charlotte dutifully laid one of the tiny cakes on the ugly brown and white earthenware plate Marius had handed her.

‘Not quite Grunwaldsee porcelain,’ he apologized.

‘Somewhere in Russia there must be a house that holds many familiar things.’

‘Given the way the troops who were stationed here behaved when it was the area headquarters, I’d say many houses. There was gambling and fighting in the courtyard every night over your family’s possessions.’

Charlotte cut the tart with a fork but made no attempt to eat it. ‘Things are just things, Marius. At my time of life, the only possessions I value are my family, my photographs and my memories.’

‘Still, my mother had time to hide one or two of your family’s belongings. I unearthed these for you yesterday.’ He unzipped an old sports bag he had carried out of the lodge when they had decided to sit outside, and removed an ancient leather-bound Bible and three photograph albums. Charlotte recognized them as part of a handsome Victorian set her grandfather had bought on his honeymoon in London. Half of them had been empty when his only son, her father, had married. One of her earliest memories was sitting on the floor of her father’s study, watching her parents cut down photographs to fit the slots in their pages.

‘All the photographs are still in them,’ he divulged proudly.

Charlotte took one into her hands and ran her fingers over the heavily embossed leather cover. ‘Wherever did your mother hide them?’ she asked huskily.

‘The same place she hid the Bibles, prayer books and hymnals from the church. Wrapped in tarpaulin under the manure heap in the stables. After the Russian army left for good and the house became a riding school and hotel, we kept them under a false floor I built at the bottom of the linen cupboard in the lodge.’

‘They are in beautiful condition.’ She opened it. On the first page was a studio photograph of her father as a young man. She turned the page to a portrait of a young woman holding a newborn baby. The date was inscribed beneath it: 6 May 1913. ‘My mother with Greta.’

‘You haven’t told me how your sister managed to survive the war.’

‘It’s typical of Greta. She left the War Office in Berlin as soon as she heard that the Russians had crossed the border into East Prussia. Hildegarde, who worked in the same building, told me years later that Greta went to their superior and asked for leave so she could go to Grunwaldsee. She used Mama and me as her excuse. She said she was worried about us, particularly in view of my advanced state of pregnancy. Her supervisor tried to persuade her not to go because of the danger and lack of transport. Greta told him that her fiancé had given her his car and she had enough petrol because he had saved his ration for months against just such an emergency. And, the biggest lie of all, when it came to her family, danger was of no consequence.’

‘But she never reached Grunwaldsee,’ Marius protested in bewilderment.

‘Because she drove west, not east. She always did have a good sense of timing, and an even better one of self-preservation. She left Berlin before the serious fighting began. And, being Greta, she enlisted the help of Helmut’s father in converting all the marks in her bank account into gold. When she reached striking distance of the British and American lines, she rented a room in a house in a small town between Hanover and Braunschweig. Her landlady’s husband was missing, presumed dead, in Russia and, having no money, she was taking in refugees.’

‘At that time Hitler was conscripting everyone to make a last-ditch stand. Surely Greta didn’t escape that.’ Marius spooned sugar into his coffee.

‘She did. She’d kept enough marks to pay her landlady two months’ rent in advance, and abandoned her uniform when she left Berlin. Dressed in civilian clothes, she pretended to be a war widow who hadn’t been conscripted because she’d had a child to look after, who’d unfortunately recently died. And there she sat in comparative comfort until the British took the town. They ignored women who were out of uniform.’

Marius pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes and offered it to Charlotte. She shook her head.

‘Even before Germany surrendered, Greta applied for a job in a British army unit as a typist and interpreter, using Wilhelm’s name as an anti-Hitlerite to get the job.’

‘My mother always said that one had no shame when it came to looking after herself. Was Helmut with her?’

‘No. Not even his father could save him from being posted to a fighting unit during the last days of the war.’ Charlotte sipped her coffee. ‘Helmut’s platoon surrendered to the Americans and he was put in one of their prisoner of war camps in the Rhineland. When the Americans discharged him early in nineteen forty-seven, he looked for Greta. I was lodging in the same house as her at the time. We’d heard that Helmut had been taken prisoner, but it hadn’t occurred to Greta to register her name and address, or Helmut’s name, with the Red Cross, and, assuming she had, I didn’t bother. By the time he found us Greta was engaged to a British major.’

‘Really?’ Marius asked in surprise.

‘As soon as the anti-fraternization laws were lifted she went to Britain on the first German bride boat. She married in England. Her in-laws refused to receive her but that didn’t bother Greta. She made sure that her husband had his own bank account and house before marrying him. They settled outside London and still live there.’

‘Did she have children?’

‘No. She never made any secret of the fact that she didn’t want any, even when she was engaged to Helmut and they were both active members of the Nazi Party. Which I found strange, as the Party insisted a woman’s first duty was to produce children for the Fatherland.’

‘What happened to Helmut?’ Marius asked curiously. ‘I remember him as weak-willed when it came to Greta but he wasn’t a bad sort. He used to slip me marks and my mother tins of meat when Greta wasn’t watching, and always with the whisper, “Don’t tell Greta”.’

Charlotte smiled. ‘I remember him slipping Erich money for his piggybank, too, with the same warning. It was awful, Marius. Helmut arrived at our lodging house one evening in early February. Erich and I were sitting at a table by the window of the room that did service as kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom for both of us. I saw Helmut walking up and down the street checking house numbers. He was filthy, unshaven and dressed in the rags of his uniform. He saw me, waved and ran to the front door. I left the table and went down to let him in. He hugged me, all the while asking about Greta. Then he looked up and saw her standing on the stairs above us.

‘He dropped me and ran to her. I can even remember his first words: “We may have lost everything, Greta darling, but we still have one another. We can build a life together.”

‘She stepped away from him and said, “Not with me you can’t. Germany is finished and I’m getting out. I have a new fiancé, an Englishman, and a place on a boat that’s leaving for England soon. He’s taking me to London. He has a house there, a fine house, and his father owns a business.” Greta even flashed her engagement ring, an enormous, dazzling emerald and diamond cluster. Then she said, “I’m sorry I can’t give you yours back, Helmut, but I had to sell it to get food. If you’ll excuse me, I’m late.”’

‘That’s Greta,’ Marius said philosophically. ‘Did you really expect her to stay in a country everyone thought was finished and remain poor?’

‘I expected her to be kinder to Helmut. When I asked her later about the way she’d treated him, she told me it was better to be realistic than offer a pretence of kindness.’

There was more that Charlotte couldn’t begin to describe to Marius. He had lived all his life at Grunwaldsee, and she doubted he had an inkling of the type of woman Greta had become at the end of the war.

The expression on Helmut’s face had told her he’d missed nothing: Greta’s fashionable suit, expensive hair-do, new shoes and nylons. There had been no need for her to explain to Helmut what had happened to her sister. More than half the German girls in the country, married and unmarried, were fraternizing with any and every one of the conquerors who had food, cigarettes or black market goods to spare. French, American, English – it made no difference. But Greta had set her sights higher than the common herd. She only socialized with and, when the acquisition of essential luxuries demanded it, slept with officers, and well-to-do ones at that. And, unlike most of her countrywomen, she succeeded in catching one.

‘And you? We heard that the SS requisitioned the cart and that you were forced to hand Erich over to the doctor. The doctor and his wife told us about it when they returned to visit Allenstein a few years ago.’

‘After the doctor took Erich, and Mama and Minna were killed, I hid in the forest. My daughter was stillborn there. And afterwards … afterwards, Manfred Adolf found me.’

‘He came here once with General Paulus. Mama was surprised to see German troops fighting for the Russians.’

‘Manfred had always been a Communist. He hated Hitler even before the war. In changing sides he succeeded in fighting for what he had believed in all along. How many soldiers could say that at the end of the war? Not many Germans I know,’ Charlotte said sadly. ‘He became quite famous on the post-war East German political scene, but then you’d know that better than me. I wonder if he remained faithful to the Communist Party after the wall came down.’

‘He died a month afterwards. Some say of a broken heart.’

‘Manfred risked his life, and those of his men, by taking me within sight of a retreating Luftwaffe unit. The officer in charge conscripted me. I was forced to stay with them until I was demobbed in Bavaria in May nineteen forty-five.’

‘So far from home.’

‘The worst was not knowing where Erich was, or even if he had survived. I don’t have to tell you about the chaos at the end of the war. It was weeks before I found him in an orphanage.’