Restitution (6 page)

‘We’ll just throw the bastards right back where they came from.’ Reuben the eldest boy seemed to simmer with furious energy. His mother put a hand on his sleeve.

‘Keep out of trouble.’

He shook her off. Through the window came the sound of feet pounding over cobbles. Polish soldiers in their square-topped caps trying to regroup, to think of something else they could try,
knowing it was too late.

A few weeks later, when the news of the partition of Poland with the Russians reached the Gronowskis, Reuben and his younger brother Jacob sat with Mr Gronowski’s road
atlas spread out in front of them on the carpet, muttering about joining the Polish Home Army and resisting the invaders. Gregor and his mother and the Gronowski parents sat in pairs on the two
elegant sofas arranged facing each other. The two girls were playing a board game in a corner, oblivious, apparently, to the tension in the room. Gregor wished he could join the boys on the floor
but hadn’t the nerve. They thought he was a kid. From where he sat he could see Reuben’s pencil mark, a north-south line dividing the country into the German and Russian sectors.

‘We need to fight them. I’ve got friends who can put us in touch with other patriots.’ Reuben kept his eyes on the map as he spoke, obviously knowing the reaction his words
would arouse.

‘For God’s sake, do you want to face a firing squad? Get yourselves sent off for forced labour?’ Mr Gronowski got up and reclaimed his touring map, previously used only to plan
the family’s annual holidays in the Tatras. He stabbed the sheet. ‘We should all head south for the mountains.’

‘People are saying—’

‘What people?’ said his mother. ‘You mean those types you meet in Nalewki Street?’

‘Jews, Mama. Just like us.’

‘Not
“like us”.’ Mrs Gronowska glanced round the drawing room with its Persian rugs and the Monet hanging over the fireplace. ‘We are assimilated,
Polish-speaking professionals.’

‘I’m sure Himmler’ll take your word for it.’

‘Don’t speak like that to your mother, Reuben.’ Mr Gronowski sounded more sad than angry.

‘I should have taken Gregor straight to Hungary.’ Eva’s eyes were still puffy from lack of sleep. ‘I failed my own son.’

‘You were ill,’ Gregor said for the fortieth time.

‘They probably wouldn’t have let you in.’ Mrs Gronowska spoke so quietly Gregor could hardly pick up the words. ‘It’s not your fault, Eva.’

‘It is. Perhaps I should have left him with the von Matkes in Pomerania. Nobody in Germany bears him any ill-feeling. He’s still got his German passport.’

In the weeks preceding the invasion the Polish officials had fortunately failed to remember this fact. On the carpet, Reuben and Jacob exchanged a glance.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ Gregor tried to make the words authoritative.

His mother reached across the sofa and pulled him to her. He could hear her heart beating under her angora jumper. Eva had always loved fine clothes. He could feel her ribs; she’d never
regained the weight she’d lost from her influenza. She even showed a few grey hairs now, and there were fine lines round her eyes. But she still drew glances when they took their Sunday
afternoon strolls down Nowy Swiat to admire the art deco buildings and buy a cheap nosegay at a street kiosk, or picnicked on something cheap but perfectly presented in the Lazienki Park.

‘How did they know, Gregor?’ Her voice was controlled, her stage training never left her. ‘Who told them about my father?’ It was a question she could never answer to her
satisfaction.

A few days later Gregor found her sorting through their clothes in the little room she shared with one of the young Gronowska girls. ‘You’ve got a German passport,
a German name and you’re only one-quarter Jewish.’ She let out a breath. ‘You understand what I’m saying, don’t you, Gregor?’

‘You can’t
still
believe I’d be safer in Germany?’ He flopped down onto the bed. ‘We’ve been through this again and again.’

‘Don’t crease those shirts.’ She lifted them from the bed. ‘They may have released your father from that camp by now.’ Matthias had been arrested for publishing
left-wing books before Eva and Gregor had fled Germany. ‘If war’s coming they’ll need every man they can get to fight.’ Her hands tightened around a wool cardigan. Gregor
tried to picture his father in the Wehrmacht and failed. If they gave him a weapon Matthias Fischer would probably manage to shoot off his own foot. He’d always been useless with any kind of
tool or machine except a typewriter; when he’d visited the printers they’d refused to let him within a metre of their precious presses because of his reputation for jinxing equipment.
And, almost uniquely for someone of his generation, he had problems with taking orders. Gregor looked at his mother and felt a deep pity. Perhaps her longing for Matthias cut her like it did him.
She must pine for one of Matthias’s rib-crushing hugs or deep guffaws.

‘The German authorities here will probably send you back to Berlin, they’ll regard you as one more ethnic German who needs to return to the Reich,’ she went on. ‘But
while you’re with me, you’re at risk.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’ There was no point in rerunning the conversation. But God knows what they’d do with him in Germany – place him in some dreadful youth camp,
probably. Or foster him out to the kind of family who thought Picasso and Chagall were alternative names for Beelzebub. His mother didn’t need to hear these thoughts. He tried to rally
himself. ‘I’ll probably be back with Papa in our apartment before long,’ he assured her, his fingers tracing the Paisley pattern on a silk shirt he remembered his father giving
her one Christmas. After they’d arrived in Warsaw Eva had written to Marie asking her to send on some of their clothes. Marie had gone to the Berlin apartment and packed up a big trunk.
Gregor and his mother were well turned out. They didn’t look like refugees even if they could only pay rare visits to the cafés and cinemas Eva loved so much. ‘But where will you
go, Mama?’

‘East across the Bug. To my father’s old village. I still have cousins there, remote ones, but they’ll take me in. Perhaps I can find some kind of work.’

‘God, Mama!’ He could use
language
with her now; she seemed to treat him almost as a grown-up. ‘What kind of work would a trained actress find in a rural Jewish village?
And the Soviets—’

‘Have no quarrel with me. Remember the books by that Russian engineer your father published? About Soviet construction triumphs – the dams and canals? They went down very well in
Moscow.’

He didn’t like to tell her that he didn’t remember. And his father had probably destroyed all the remaining copies of those books years ago; they’d have been death warrants
after 1933.

‘This will only be a temporary measure.’ Eva sounded almost jaunty. But she was an actress, practised at feigning emotion. ‘The French and British will soon be making a
nuisance of themselves, I expect. And that’ll be the end of Hitler.’ Her defiant expression made her look like she had in the photograph of her as Joan of Arc in a Vienna
production.

She stared at the shirts. ‘Clothes will be in short supply now. Take care of your things. I’ll write to you once a week.’

‘How will you get out of Warsaw?’

Eva bent her head down to study a button on a velvet dress. ‘A friend has transport.’

‘Which friend?’ She’d never mentioned anyone like this before. Sometimes she slipped out of the house for an hour in the early evening. For fresh air, she said.

‘His name is Viktor. He has contacts in a construction company working for the Germans. Their trucks leave the city all the time.’

Viktor who?’

Viktor Vargá,’ she said slowly. ‘I know him from Vienna days. I didn’t realize until recently that he was in Warsaw too.’

Vargá. Is that Hungarian?’

She nodded. ‘But I don’t think he’s lived there for a long time. He spent some time in Russia before the war.’

‘And it’s this Vargá’s idea that you should go to the Soviet sector?’

‘What is this, an interrogation?’ She was almost annoyed with him now, he could tell.

‘Mama, it sounds dangerous. Do you trust him?’

Viktor will get me out of the city safely. He’s an old friend.’

‘He could be a spy for the Germans.’

‘His sympathies were for the other side, as I remember.’ She gave a wry smile before her expression became more sombre. ‘I really believe this is the best for both of us,
Gregor,
Liebling.’
She sounded as though she were repeating a line she’d told herself again and again.

He wanted to ask her more about this Vargá fellow but she smiled that famous dazzling smile of hers and he knew she was trying to deflect further questions. ‘I want to come with
you. It’s not right that you should go by yourself. Papa wouldn’t have wanted me to let you do this.’

Eva bent down towards a silk dress and twisted one of its buttons between her fingers so the thread grew tighter and tighter.

One morning a few days after this conversation he woke to find his mother gone, the white quilt pulled neatly up over the pillow on her bed. Mrs Gronowska put a hand on his
shoulder. ‘It happened very suddenly in the early hours. Vargá got hold of a timber wagon leaving the city with all the right papers and someone knocked on the door for her. Chances
like that don’t come up often.’

Words seemed to fill his throat, twisting together, choking him. ‘She didn’t . . .’

‘Say goodbye. No.’ Mrs Gronowska’s touch became a clasp. ‘She was worried you’d want to go with her. It’s only temporary, Gregor, just for the next month or
so.’ She gave a forced laugh. ‘Eva had to wear an old pair of overalls with a turban round her hair. She wouldn’t have got many cabaret parts dressed like that.’

She was trying hard to console him. Gregor forced himself to stretch his facial muscles into an amused expression. ‘She left this.’ She took an envelope from her dress pocket and he
ripped it open.

When Mrs Gronowska went to supervise breakfast Gregor sat on the stairs, letter in hand, staring at the front door through which his mother had crept so silently hours earlier.

‘What the hell are you doing staring into space like an idiot?’ someone said below him.

He hadn’t heard Jacob coming out of the dining room.

‘Your breakfast is waiting. Hurry up or one of the girls will eat it.’ His hand was gentle on Gregor’s back. ‘You wouldn’t believe what greedy little devils they
are. And don’t worry – Vargá would have done everything necessary to make sure your mother’s safe.’

‘Have you ever met this Vargá?’

‘None of us have, except your mother. They met at one of those cafés in Nalewki Street. That’s what Reuben said. He’s got friends who know Vargá.’

So that’s where Mama had gone on those evenings when she’d pleaded headaches and said she was going to walk in the evening air. Gregor felt a kind of impotent exasperation. The
Gronowski boys seemed to know so much more about what’d been going on than he did.

‘How did Vargá know she was in the city?’

Jacob rolled his eyes. ‘You’ll never make a Varsovian, Gregor. Word travels in this city. Particularly among us Jews.’

‘But you’re not really . . .’ He stopped.

‘Observant? No. The Gronowskis have lived a pretty secular life for the last half-century or so. But we still have friends and family in the Jewish community.’ He slapped
Gregor’s back. ‘Come on, little German boy.’

One afternoon he came into the drawing room and found Reuben smoothing down the Persian rug. Reuben looked up. ‘Damn thing’s never sat properly.’

Gregor sat on the floor beside him, the question almost hanging out of his mouth. Reuben raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’

‘Why are you nice to me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m German. I’m supposed to be getting myself repatriated to the glorious Reich. You should hate me.’

Reuben shrugged. ‘Vargá obviously trusts your mother.’

Once again, this man’s name. But other things were on his mind at the moment. ‘I’m caught in the crack.’

‘What crack? What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t belong here and if I go home I won’t belong there. They’ll stick me in some institution, try and make a Nazi out of me.’ The words fell from his mouth.

Reuben studied him. ‘What do you want to do?’

Gregor shrugged. He didn’t even know how to fire a pistol. He was probably a useless fighter like his father.

Reuben stroked the rug, saying nothing for a while. ‘I’ll speak to a friend of mine who’s close to Vargá,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps he’ll have some
suggestions.’

‘This Vargá . . .’

‘What about him?’

‘Everything seems to come back to him. And yet everyone’s always so vague about who he is exactly.’

Reuben nodded. ‘No bad thing in wartime, a bit of vagueness.’ Gregor sensed no more information was to be obtained on the subject of Vargá and stood.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I mean it. Thank you for accepting me.’ God, he’d probably sounded like an idiot.

Reuben was still staring at him. ‘You’re almost one of us really.’