Restitution (5 page)

But he simply smiled. ‘A feast!’ He stroked the tins as though they were kittens and pulled out a couple for her to open.

She found saucepans and heated milk and soup. He’d already fallen on the bread, tearing off great chunks and stuffing them into his mouth. Alix stared at him, remembering how his mother
had fretted over his table manners. ‘You’re a good socialist,’ Papi had once taunted Eva over a lunch table covered in fine linen and porcelain. ‘What do
you
care
about such bourgeois niceties?’

‘I care,’ she had said, turning those intense dark eyes of hers to Papi. ‘It’s not just the Junker class who like to do things properly, Peter. Consideration and
politeness are classless traits.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Papi had refilled Eva’s wineglass. Behind them, unnoticed by either, but audible to Alix, Lena had emitted a small sigh.

Alix pushed away the memories and excused herself to wash in the cloakroom. Her reflection in the glass told her the story of the day’s events – that darkness under her eyes
wasn’t soot to wash away. Lena, the horses, the soldiers . . . She closed her eyes and clutched the basin.
Don’t think about it.

‘I’m trying hard to save you your fair share but you’d better hurry,’ he called as she walked back through the hall. Through the windows the snow now fell with more
determination. She sat next to Gregor and ate too, with increasing appetite, slurping spoonfuls of soup, cramming bread into her mouth and wiping crumbs off her face with the back of her hand.
Breakfast had been a long time ago.

She watched his long, slender fingers crumble bread. Musician’s hands. Gregor’s hands. Her fear seemed to have abated a little as she’d eaten. He was looking at her own hands
with their blackened nails. ‘Dirt’s ideologically sound. Cleanliness is decadent.’ He grinned and she found her own lips stretching into an answering smile.

He finished the soup, sat back and sighed. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve eaten for at least three years.’

‘I made it.’ At least she sounded less scared now.

‘You?’ His lips curled.

‘Why are you grinning like that?’ He’d never believed her capable of anything practical. She remembered how he’d smirked when she attempted to pump up a bicycle tyre or
sew on a button, on one of the rare occasions when no servant was on hand to do these things.

‘Just never had you down as the type who’d be in the
Küche.
You used to prefer being outdoors, riding around on those ponies of yours.’

‘Lena had me in the kitchen learning how to make cheese and sausages.’

Amusement lit his face. ‘Not what your mother had in mind for you: finishing school in Switzerland and history of art in Florence, wasn’t it?’

‘Something like that.’ She eyed the insignia on his tunic, which looked as though it had been made for a broader man. The uniform of the barbarian. How did he really regard her? A
beneficiary of the enemy system which had done all those terrible things Papi’d told her about? She blushed again. Gregor had half-closed his eyes, as though he were trying to blot out
something. Last time they’d sat this close it had been a July night. They’d still been children then, but there’d been a moment when they’d felt something more than mere
childish affection. At least, she had. It had only been a single kiss. Chances were he’d forgotten it.

The shutters rattled. The snow was blowing itself into a storm. Good. It would cover her footprints and slow down the Red Army. On the other hand, it might bring others here seeking shelter. She
shouldn’t be in this warm kitchen with its blue and white Dutch tiles above the stove, and the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and reflecting the light of the gas lamp. She’d
been a fool to come back, she should have obeyed Mami and kept on going west, no matter what. She’d promised and promises mattered. Papi had always told her that. Then, about a year ago,
he’d shaken his head and said that therein lay the officer’s dilemma. If you’d promised a monster you’d serve him it was still a promise.

Terrible things everywhere. Memories of what had happened during the day stormed inside her head. She put a hand to one temple, trying to push them away.

‘What is it?’ Gregor asked.

She got up. ‘I’m going now. This isn’t safe.’

‘You can’t.’ He put out a hand and grabbed her wrist. ‘You’d freeze out there.’

‘Better to freeze than be shot. Or raped.’

He flinched, as though she’d slapped him round the face.

‘I didn’t mean you.’ Not the boy who’d shared a bath with her when he stayed here in the holidays. Who’d crept out of bed to share midnight feasts. Though God alone
knew what he’d done since she’d last seen him. Impossible to imagine how he’d survived, what life had forced him to become.

‘Please sit down.’ He pointed at her chair and their eyes locked. She sat. ‘You’ll be safe here tonight.’

She let herself slump back in the kitchen chair with its faded padded cushions made by Lena when she’d still had time to sew non-essentials.

‘What happened today, Alix?’

She wanted to throw the question back at him and ask him what the hell had happened to
him
in the last six years, but found herself answering him instead. ‘Lena and I were in the
wagon heading west to a cousin’s, meeting Mami on the way.’

‘Where’d she been?’

‘Berlin. Trying to find out about Papi. They’d arrested him, you see. Because of the July Plot.’ She looked at him to gauge his reaction but his expression gave nothing away.
‘They kept moving him round and we’d lost contact with him. The parcels we sent were returned to us.’

Gregor nodded.

‘We’d packed up the wagon when we heard the Reds – the Russians – were so close. The police were watching us. We couldn’t leave till the very last moment or
they’d have arrested us for defeatism.’

‘Especially with your father being involved with the Bomb Plot?’

She nodded.

‘What exactly did he do, Alix?’

She shrugged. ‘Mami said he’d made a few telephone calls on the day, trying to garner support. She doesn’t know the details.’

‘Your father probably thought he was protecting her by keeping her in the dark. It must have been dreadful for you both.’

‘You can have no idea, Gregor.’

A strange expression twisted his face for a moment. She wished she hadn’t said the last bit.

‘Mami grew more and more desperate as the Russians came nearer. She said we owed the local people as much protection as we could give them. Refugees came here from East Prussia and they
told us . . .’ Alix paused, remembering those last weeks, Mami looking at the big map of Pomerania and East Prussia hanging in Papi’s study and biting her lip. Lena packing bag after
bag, saying nothing and hushing Alix whenever she mentioned the Russian advance. The women and children from the east who sat silent in the kitchen each night and wouldn’t say what
they’d seen on their trek.

Gregor wasn’t hurrying the narrative. He sat waiting, without saying a word. The old Gregor liked to jump in and finish your sentences, your thoughts, for you.

‘A plane attacked us on the road west, we lost the wagon. Lena and I went into the forest to shelter. We hadn’t realized that the Russian advance had got so far today. They were
already in the forest. They got Lena. She . . .’ Alix put a hand over her mouth.

His eyes hadn’t left her face. One of his hands found hers across the oilskin tablecloth. ‘It’s all right, I know . . . They’re like mistreated children. No sense of
morality.’ He sounded weary. ‘Poor Lena. Tomorrow at first light we must get you back to the road. You might be able to slip through the line. You’ve probably got a better chance
without the wagon and horses.’ He sounded like her childhood friend again, gentle, thoughtful. Mami always said that Gregor was a sweet boy. But those missing years . . .

‘You sound as if . . .’ She didn’t seem able to finish a single sentence. She forced herself to continue. ‘You seem concerned for me.’

He looked baffled. ‘Of course I am.’

‘You say that, but you’re wearing that uniform and I don’t really know who you are now.’

‘Who I am?’ he dropped her hand. ‘What do you mean? The same person I always was.’

She said nothing but looked closely at his uniform again.

‘No, you’re right. Probably not. How could I be?’ He made a rectangle with his thumbs and index fingers.

‘I don’t know anything about what happened to you. Or why you . . .’ She eyed the cap on the table in front of them.

‘I couldn’t have survived if I hadn’t joined the Soviets.’ He looked at the shape he’d made with his fingers.

‘Tell me.’ At last she had found the courage to ask him.

‘Where should I start?’

‘You and your mother went to Warsaw. Papi said it was sudden, that they’d deported you with lots of Jews. I can’t remember the exact year.’ Alix remembered her puzzlement
at the news. Why would anyone want Eva and Gregor to leave the country? There’d been telephone calls, Papi ringing friends in various ministries, cajoling, shouting, despairing; Mami sitting
silent in the salon smoking cigarette after cigarette.

‘They phoned us one night in our apartment in Berlin, a few months after we were here that summer of ’38.’

That last summer.

‘You remember where we lived in Berlin, don’t you, Alix?’

She did. ‘I remember a street of smart apartment blocks with cherry trees in blossom and a courtyard at the back where cats sunned themselves.’ The Fischers’ apartment had
housed Eva’s piano and gramophone. Books had spilled out of shelves and cupboards; they even piled up on the wooden floor. Matthias had loved books. ‘What do you think of this?’
he’d say as he pushed books of poetry, short stories or political essays onto the von Matkes. ‘Read it and tell me what you make of it. He’s a new Bulgarian author, very
daring.’

Alix thought of something else. ‘But there was a garage on the corner. I remember the smell of the rubber and petrol.’

‘Spoilt the street’s tone, some said. But Papi thought it gave us a touch of proletarian authenticity. With comments like that you can see why they . . .’ He shook his head.
‘They rang one night that October and told my mother she had to be out by the following morning. Anyone with Jewish blood who wasn’t born in Germany had to leave the Reich.’

‘Jewish?’ Alix sat up. ‘I had no idea.’ Alexandra von Matke had probably been the most naïve girl in Europe.

‘She’d kept it quiet. Until the summer of 1938 when suddenly the Gestapo knew all about my grandfather. He was a rabbi’s son. They lived in eastern Poland before the first
war.’

‘But your mother . . . ?’ Alix frowned. ‘Mami never mentioned she was Jewish.’

‘Collective amnesia. In Vienna, when they first got to know her, my mother lived a secular life. She’d left Poland as a small child, spoke German like a native and looked like a
Gentile – her own mother wasn’t Jewish, so she wasn’t even properly Jewish herself, either.’ He shifted his weight in the chair. ‘Nobody ever suspected. Until
1938.’ His eyebrows locked into a frown.

‘Surely when she married your father she could have got German citizenship?’

Gregor shrugged. ‘She had a German passport all right. But they confiscated it when they arrested my father. Back then they didn’t
want
us to leave the country. Then suddenly
we couldn’t leave quickly enough for them. They stuffed us into sealed freight cars and transported us east. Then we were unloaded into a field on the Polish border. There was nothing, no
shelter, no water, nowhere to . . . no sanitation. The Poles said Mama’s birth certificate, showing she’d been born in Poland, meant nothing. They didn’t want to take in stateless
Jews. And I had a German passport, so I should go back to Berlin.’

‘Without your mother?’

‘Naturally I couldn’t do that. Even though your father begged me.’

‘Papi?’ She sat up, remembering something. ‘Your mother rang here, didn’t she?’ A telephone call late at night, Papi and Mami talking in hushed tones, Papi running
out to the car with blankets and a thermos.

‘My mother told me he came to the frontier with food and warm clothes. And money. He must have paid someone to pass it to us. I remember Mami opening the parcel and crying because she was
so relieved to have those things. They’d stolen our suitcase at the station and we had nothing. We bribed a guard to let us sleep in a stinking barn with the cows. It was freezing: small
children and old people were just lying in the open.’ Gregor paused. ‘At least we had what your father’d given us. The next morning Mami paid the farmer to post a letter to
friends in Warsaw. They must have pulled some strings because two days later a policeman came to the barn and stamped our papers, said we could travel on to Warsaw and told us we were lucky not to
have our Jewish arses whipped.’

He shook his head. ‘Mama and I knew Poland wasn’t safe. It was only supposed to be temporary, until we could get south to Hungary or Romania, and then to Palestine or South Africa.
Hard to imagine, but the Poles hated Yids even more than the Germans. But my mother got sick when we arrived in Warsaw, probably because of those nights in the barn. We missed our chance of getting
out.’

‘Tell me about Warsaw.’ She leaned towards him.

‘Not much to tell. We stayed with some second cousins of my mother’s, the Gronowskis. They had sons a little older than me and a couple of little girls. They . . .’ He let out
a breath.

‘Tell me?’

He turned his eyes to hers and the intensity of his gaze was like a blow. ‘It was only six years ago, that’s what I keep telling myself. It feels like another century.’

Something rumbled outside and the house shook. ‘Tell me.’ She clutched at his hand.

Gregor

Warsaw, September 1939

‘Tanks.’ Mr Gronowski closed the windows to block out the rumbling. ‘They’ll be here within the half-hour.’ His face was shadowed and he and his
wife looked a decade older, no longer the cheerful middle-aged couple who’d found room for Eva and Gregor in their spacious apartment in fashionable Marianska Street. ‘Just three weeks
for them to reach Warsaw.’