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Authors: Eliza Graham

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‘Are you heading west?’ Jana asked.

‘First light the day after tomorrow. We’re to meet Mami south of Berlin.’

‘Ah yes, her interview.’ Jana paused. ‘Lena told me. The baroness must be nervous, no?’

‘It’s routine. She seems more worried about the Red Army getting here before we’ve left.’

‘One hears such things about the Soviets.’ Jana’s eyes were owl-like behind her glasses. Alix didn’t ask her what she’d heard. ‘One barely knows what to
believe. I shall come and say goodbye before I leave.’

Already the relationship was growing more formal. Jana would go home and agree with her friends and family – those who’d survived – that Germans were monsters. No reason for
her to think any different just because one family had treated her well. Alix made her excuses and crossed the stable yard to return to the house. She had to consult her list. Most of her clothes
were already packed in a suitcase, ready for a quick departure. In a rucksack she would take a torch, water bottle, hairbrush, soap and toothbrush. A small towel. A clean shirt and underwear. An
additional thick wool jumper.

Much would have to remain in the house. A few days ago Mami had loaded valuables into concrete pipes and one of the Polish men had dug trenches in the vegetable garden and helped her lay the
pipes in them. Rows of cabbages, neatly replanted, now grew on top of the Sèvres dinner service, the Bohemian crystal and the silverware. There hadn’t been time to bury all the
treasures in Alexanderhof, though. Shame they couldn’t bury the grandfather clock, the Steinway, the tractor and the threshing machine, Mami had said.

The Polish worker had left the following morning without a word, desperate, Jana said, to find his wife and children in the Tatras.

‘If I’d known he was leaving I’d have given him food for the journey,’ Mami said. ‘He’s taking a risk, there are still SS patrols out there.’

‘He just wanted to go home,’ Jana had replied.

As Alix returned from the workers’ cottages to the main house, an explosion to the east rocked the white, three-storeyed building and the ground beneath her. A chimney pot crashed down to
the snowy flowerbeds where Mami had once, a thousand years ago, grown night-scented stocks.

The last night in the house. Alix walked through every room, saying silent farewells to tables and chairs, the portraits of relatives long dead, the Meissen circus animals in
the cabinet in the salon. The Gobelin tapestries in the dining room. A Chinese urn in which she’d been able to secrete herself as a child when she was playing hide and seek. The photographs
of Mami in all those film parts and from earlier in her career when she worked on the stage in Vienna. And Papi’s clocks. They were taking two of his favourites in the wagon. The others,
including the grandfather clock and the porcelain lyre clock in the drawing room – admired, family history had it, by the Kaiser himself – would have to stay. The golden Haflingers with
their blond manes and tails were sturdy creatures but too small to pull a heavy load so far. Alix wound the clocks for the last time. As she did every night she adjusted their times, moving some
hands forward and some back. Papi’s clocks never ran accurately after he’d repaired them. If only he’d been a little more methodical, perhaps he and his friends would have
succeeded with their plans.

Mami had left this morning for Berlin. Alix had driven her the seven miles to the nearest station in the trap. The station had been crammed with people attempting the dash west. The police had
stood in the entrance hall, grabbing would-be absconders and pulling them into the waiting room to interrogate them. ‘You are perfectly safe,’ Alix heard one of them tell an elderly
couple with a canary in a cage and a single suitcase. ‘Return to your home.’

Mami had no problems because of the papers summoning her to the interview. She looked the police in the eye, without a flicker of fear. Alix could see admiration in their faces. Mami wore a
Chanel charcoal-grey winter suit and her smartest fur, a dashing little hat angled on her sleek head. She looked every inch the baroness, the famous actress, the woman whose face had graced the
backs of prewar cigarette cards. Not a woman scared for her family. The doctor had been to visit her a few days ago to give a further prescription of the sleeping tablets she took every night.
‘If I can sleep, I can fight,’ she’d told Lena and Alix. Something unreadable had flickered across Lena’s placid stare for just a second.

Mami’d given Lena directions for where they were to meet, a crossroads away from the main roads. If that meeting failed, they were to keep on going west, ultimately heading for the
cousin’s house hundreds of miles away in the Rhineland, taking the route Mami had described to Alix. ‘Keep away from the cities,’ Mami warned. ‘But I’ll be with you by
then anyway.’ And she’d smiled that famous smile of hers; the one that had melted hearts across Europe and might yet persuade the Gestapo to free Papi. Alix had felt like she had as a
child when Mami had left her at boarding school in Switzerland.

‘Can’t I come with you?’ she’d begged.

‘It’s madness for you to risk the bombs in Berlin when you don’t have to.’ Mami checked her handbag for powder compact and lipstick, her props. ‘And how would Lena
manage the wagon without you? You need to be strong,
Schatz,
a proper Prussian, steady and purposeful.’

Alix straightened her shoulders.

‘Just get across the Oder as quickly as you can. And check the horses’ hoofs again. Those icy roads . . .’ The train hooted. Mami got into the carriage, negotiating the steep
steps with the easy grace of one trained in stage movement. She might have been boarding a first-class carriage for a holiday trip. She waved one last time and the train pulled out. Alix walked
back along the platform, reminding herself that Mami wasn’t a prisoner.

In the ticket office the policeman was still watching everyone who passed. The posters warning against defeatism and assuring civilians of the protection of the Wehrmacht glared down from the
walls. The man in the trilby stared at Alix. She made a point of putting her hands into her coat pockets and sauntering out of the entrance hall. On the steps outside the station a woman with two
small children hovered.

‘Was that the Berlin train?’

Alix nodded.

The woman sighed.

Alix glanced at the Gestapo man.

The woman’s pupils contracted. ‘It’s my sister in Jüter-bog,’ she stammered. ‘She’s not well. She needs me to help her with the children. Just for a day
or so. Then we’ll come right back home.’ She rubbed her nose.

Alix looked at the woman’s stuffed suitcase.

‘Perhaps I’ve over-packed for a short visit?’ the woman whispered.

Alix nodded again.

That evening she walked upstairs to her bedroom for the last time, trying to make the ascent last for ever. She could have climbed these stairs blindfolded; she knew every
creaking step, every worn patch of carpet, the uneven section on the banister where the oak felt rough under her fingers. She went into her parents’ room and sat on the bed. Mami had
decorated this room just before the war and it had lasted well. No rips or marks sullied the periwinkle Toile de Jouy wallpaper: the young men still pushed the girls in their swings, the roses
still bloomed round them. The blue satin quilt was pulled tight across the bed, creaseless, impregnable. Mami had made her bed herself these last years. Mami said Lena had enough to do elsewhere.
Sometimes Mami had to be firm with Lena or she’d wear herself to the bone.

Papi had shared this bedroom with Mami, but of his presence there was now very little evidence. Mami had given away some of his clothes to the Winter Appeal. She’d packed up his hunting
clothes and country suits and hidden them in the attic, putting aside only a few essential garments for him to wear when he was released and they could finally head west.
When,
Mami had
always said. Not
if.
The only things of Papi’s left in the room were his old dressing gown on the back of the door and the silver hairbrushes he always kept at home. Alix picked them
up and looked at the initials engraved on their leather backs.
P.H.E.v.M.
Peter Hubertus Ernst von Matke. All the von Matkes were called Peter, Hubertus and Ernst. In various combinations.
Mami had insisted that her daughter would not be called Ernestina or Petronella. Or Huberta, assuming there were such a name. They’d consulted the family tree and chosen the name Alexandra,
which had belonged to Alix’s great-great-great-aunt and was a nod towards the name of this house: Alexanderhof. Alexanderhof was the town in Brandenburg where the von Matkes had lived before
they’d moved here in the middle of the eighteenth century to enjoy their new estate and the house with its fashionable plasterwork and its terraces and gardens landscaped in the English
fashion.

Alix examined her own reflection in the glass: Alexandra Elisabeth Henriette von Matke: last of the line. And about to forsake all the glories of the family seat like a frightened scullery
maid.

Mami had packed a small case to take to Berlin; the rest of her luggage would go in the wagon. A pair of oyster-pink silk pyjamas still sat folded on the pillow. On the dressing table sat her
bottles of scent. Alix walked to the table and picked up the Jean Patou, spraying a wrist. The perfume didn’t smell like it did on Mami. But then Alix wasn’t Maria Weissmüller, was
she? Mami’d taken to using her famous maiden name when she took calls from the Gestapo, probably in the hope of jogging a sentimental memory of her best-loved roles: Anna in
Anna
Karenina,
Effi in
Effi Briest.
Tragic and beautiful women. Only yesterday Alix had watched Mami sitting at this dressing table, her face smiling out from the glass looking familiar but
different because it was a reflection. Mami was supposed to have a very symmetrical face; film cameras liked symmetry. So in theory the features in the mirror should have looked exactly like their
original. But as she watched her mother apply the rouge and eyebrow pencil Alix perceived a difference between the two faces. The reflection smiled like Mami but wasn’t really her.
Go away
and give me back my mother.

On the dressing table stood a photograph of Mami as a little girl in Tyrolean dress. Alix picked it up and studied her mother’s features. Impossible to work out from looking at her whether
this child, this little Marie, had ever imagined she’d grow up to be a famous actress and live so far away from home. And to plead for her disgraced husband: her most important role ever.

Four

Marie

South Tyrol, April 1919

The Angelus bell was tolling and she ought to be heading straight home. Marie stopped and watched the old man and the younger woman unload their handcart. Together they pulled
up the panel on the top of the cart and Marie saw it was actually a frame, hung with purple and white striped curtains. The old man untied a board from the side of the cart, pulled out a piece of
chalk from his pocket and wrote on the board the words:
The Adventures of Kasperl.

The bell ceased its toll. She was now late for lunch. Hannelore, the housekeeper, would scold. Marie broke into a run, disobeying the rules of the nuns, who maintained that young girls should
always act with decorum on the streets of Meran, just as they would in the presence of Our Lady herself.

As they sat in the dusty dining room over the meal Marie tried to explain to her father what she’d seen, the little stage and the sign about Kasperl, whoever he was. He gazed at the watery
soup with the few dumplings floating on the surface as she told him about the frame and the curtains and the sign. ‘A little puppet theatre.’ A thin smile briefly warmed his face.

‘Puppets!’

‘Kasperl is a rogue, I seem to remember. They used to come here most market days but I haven’t seen them for years now, not since . . .’

Before the war.

She didn’t need him to finish the sentence. The puppets belonged to a time long before that when young men had started to limp home on crutches and so many women had started wearing black
dresses and hats.

‘Can we go?’

‘Go?’ He looked puzzled.

‘To the puppet show. I want to see Kasperl.
Bitte,
Papa!’

Marie’s father ate his last dumpling and gazed at the empty bowl. ‘I wonder if Hannelore has any cheese for us today? Eat some more bread, child.’

She helped herself to another slice and chewed obediently on its hardness, knowing better than to repeat her plea. He watched her. ‘At least we’ll have some lettuces growing in the
garden soon. And the hens have started laying again.’

She swallowed hard on the bread.

‘Why not go to the show?’ He shrugged. ‘It won’t cost much. Come and find me this afternoon and I’ll give you some money. Take young Preizler and Lena.’

Marie’s two closest friends.

‘Won’t you come, Papa?’

‘I’ve essays to mark. One of my pupils, young Johann, writes a fine Latin prose.’ His expression darkened. ‘Once I’d have been sending him to the seminary. Now I
don’t know. But perhaps a good education will still count.’

The three of them, Marie, Anton Preizler and Lena, sat at the front of the crowd in the church square. Behind them stood a line of women, mostly black-clad – mothers,
wives and sisters, some of them young enough to be girls who’d only left the convent school a year or so ago. A few sullen-faced men, some on crutches, loitered on the periphery.

‘I wonder where the puppet-master went during the war.’ Lena was staring at the little stage. ‘My sister said he was Italian, but he can’t be because he wouldn’t
dare come back here now, would he?’

‘Why not?’ said Marie. ‘If we’re going to be part of Italy anyway?’

Anton scowled. ‘He’s Bohemian, everyone knows that.’ He sounded so certain; he always did. ‘The Italian puppets were marionettes, on strings. These are glove
puppets.’

A thin drumbeat announced the start of the show. The curtains drew to reveal Kasperl, wearing a long velvet cap with a bell on the end.
‘Tri-tra-trulla-la, Kasperl ist wieder
da
!’ he sang. ‘Are you all here?’

BOOK: Restitution
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