The Other Me (25 page)

She was proud of me as a child, proud that I’d gone to university. I don’t want to think that she might somehow be looking down, witnessing my lies and broken promises. I don’t know what went wrong – I had every intention of being Klaudia again. My hair has almost grown back, the blond threading into white, bleached ends. But it’s not about my hair. I should be defined by who I am to the people I love: daughter, partner, lover and friend. My lies have corrupted every role.

I wish for the feel of Mum’s cool hand on my forehead, and close my eyes, finding that I can breathe calmly under her imagined touch, as if all the tangled threads have been cleared away.

I’m waiting in the kitchen when my father comes down for breakfast. There’s something I need to ask. It came to me as I’d reburied the urn. I was thinking of Mum and her tough upbringing on a mountain. How she’d transferred her love for a Welsh wilderness to a small London garden. And I realised, suddenly, that I had no idea how she met my father. She’d never told me how he’d arrived at her village.

My father sits heavily at the table and I push scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes onto a plate and set it before him. I pour a cup of tea, strong and sweet, as he likes it. Then I take my place opposite him.

‘I was wondering,’ I say, leaning forward, ‘how you met Mum?’

It sounds blunter than I’d intended. I’d rehearsed the question while I cracked eggs into a bowl, and sliced tomatoes.

He blinks at me.

Other questions are bursting through me.

‘I mean, what made you want to go to Wales?’ I push on, aware of his blank face. ‘Did you go straight after the war?’

He chews his mouthful steadily, staring down at his plate. I stop myself from fidgeting. The subject of war is unmentionable. Only this is different, I tell myself. This is about the time that came after. I brace myself, expecting him to snap. Or he might ignore me. He’s done that before. I shift in my chair, cross my legs and uncross them.

‘It wasn’t afterwards.’ He wraps a hand around his glass, takes a long drink of water. ‘We met during the war.’

I frown. ‘But how?’ He’s not meeting my eyes. ‘You mean you were in Wales during the war?’

He nods. ‘I was a prisoner, in a camp there.’ His voice is curt and matter-of-fact.

I put down my fork and stare at him. ‘I had no idea that you were… captured. When…’

His mouth tightens and I see the muscle jump in his jaw. ‘It’s not something I talk about. As a soldier,’ he pauses and straightens his shoulders, ‘there is a sense of shame. It happened early in the war. I was in a U-boat. It was tough work. But it was considered important.’ He looks at a spot past my head when he talks, no emotion in his voice. ‘We were sunk. I was rescued by the English. We prisoners worked on the local farm. Your mother was the daughter of a farmhand.’ His gaze moves to my face. ‘Gwyn was so good. So pure. She changed everything. By the end of the war we knew we wanted to get married. She was old enough by then to know her own mind.’

His extraordinary revelations spin inside me, making me dizzy. I want to ask him more questions – what was it like in the camp; how did he first come to talk to Mum; were they allowed time alone together? But I can see by the hard line of his mouth that he won’t answer. He averts his eyes, continuing to eat. I watch him finishing his food. He puts his knife and fork together neatly, dabs his mouth on the napkin, stands up and leaves the room. I gather his plate and cup, put them in the sink, run the hot water, squeeze out some washing-up liquid.

The idea of being cooped up inside the narrow metal tube of a U-boat gives me claustrophobia. I don’t know how he could have borne it. And then to be torpedoed: water pouring through the damaged hull, the alarm screaming, trapped men scrambling through water in darkness. I imagine my father falling through a cold sea, being hauled aboard a British boat, half drowned. Then he’s in a field dotted with sheep, loading hay onto a truck with a pitchfork as a pretty young girl walks by. He stops, wiping the sweat from his eyes to stare; she glances over her shoulder, blushing.

What he’s told me makes sense of so many things. I’ve never thought about it properly, but how would my father have got from Germany to Wales? Maths has never been my subject, and I squint, jumbling numbers in my head with an effort, struggling to get at the answers. My mother must have been only about fourteen when she met her German prisoner. And seventeen or eighteen when they ran away together. She was young and impressionable, and it must have felt to her like being Romeo and Juliet. She was too young to understand what she was doing. But people grew up quicker in those days, I remind myself. Boys were sent to war at the age she married.

I see my young, handsome father standing behind barbed wire, resentful, ashamed, deprived of his part in the fighting, as he stares out towards the coast and the war happening without him over the sea. I slump forwards, my hands hanging loose in the warm bubbles. Tension leaves my body as I understand. He isn’t guilty. He wasn’t in the SS. He wasn’t part of any atrocities – he wasn’t there at all. And the photograph. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him, after all.

ERNST

1940, Germany

Bettina throws her bicycle down in the yard. ‘Come quick! They’re deporting the Jews!’

Meyer fastens the horse to the trap and we all clamber up. He flicks the reins over the chestnut back and she trots past fields of rye, her nostrils flaring at the pigs, snuffling as usual, noses deep in the mud. As soon as we round the corner to the station, we see the crowd. People have gathered to watch the Jews as they file past onto the platform. My eyes go to the shuffling line, and I recognise nearly all of them. Have known them since I was a child. None of them meet my gaze. I see the chemist and his wife. They carry suitcases; mothers hold the hands of children and hug smaller ones against their shoulders. They are bundled into coats and hats. It is cold. Winter is coming. The train isn’t a passenger train. It’s a goods train, and they climb up onto the boxcars, helping each other.

‘Where are they going?’ Bettina asks.

‘To a camp,’ her father tells her. ‘The Lublin Reservation.’

‘What will they do there?’ Agnes wants to know.

‘They’ll work and be given somewhere to stay and food to eat.’

We stand inside the silent crowd, watching as people climb quietly onto the train in their best clothes. A baby cries.

A face moves towards us, bloodless lips closed under vacant eyes. Mrs Baumann. I have a sudden moment of vertigo, as if my foot has stepped off a cliff. I catch my breath, hardly knowing what I’m doing as I push to the front, shoving elbows and arms out of the way. Sarah and Daniel are there too, walking either side of their mother.

I open my mouth to call Sarah’s name, but Otto’s callused skin stops the sound, his palm clamped over my face. I struggle, my heart thundering.

‘Shut up, you fool,’ Otto hisses in my ear. ‘Don’t say a word. Do you want to go with them?’

When he releases me, I lunge forwards. But he’s already caught hold of my arm, dragging me back, his nails scissoring into my muscle. I try and wrench away, but he is stronger. I’m caught by the wrist, and my skin burns as I twist and pull. Fear makes me weak, and all my flailing is ineffectual. A childish sob escapes. Mr Meyer growls at us to stop. Other people are turning to stare too, including the nearest SS soldier. I go limp just as the Baumanns pass. Daniel is carrying Sarah’s case, his face expressionless. I can’t tell if Sarah knows I’m here. She looks in front of her, a slight smile on her lips, as if she’s walking in a different world.

‘Sarah!’

The word comes from deep inside; the sound I’d make if I were drowning. A last cry. But Otto has his fingers across my mouth again. And the noise that came from my lips wasn’t the one I heard bursting out of my heart, thundering through my throat. It was more a pitiful wail, a cat being strangled.

‘It’s for the survival of Germany.’

One of his hands binds my lips; the other is curled around my bicep. I’m filled with the meaty stink of him. I roll back my lips and bite, tearing into him. He lets go with a yelp, and I’m running, running after her. Everything feels weightless and insubstantial like a dream. And Sarah floats out of reach, a blue shadow. A soldier steps in front of me, his gun lowered.

‘Go back.’ He nods towards the throng behind me.

My feet are suddenly heavy. My whole body sets hard, immovable as a house. The noises of the watching crowd, the shuffling feet of the Jews, little mews of children and whispered conversations roar through my head. And behind it I hear the drip, drip of condensation from the train onto the track. I can’t understand why Sarah isn’t turning. Why doesn’t she turn? A sob breaks in my throat. The line of passengers keeps shuffling by, giving me frightened sideways glances. A mother quietens her child. ‘No, darling. You can’t take your toys. We’ll send for them…’

I gaze past the soldier, towards the back of Sarah’s dark head. Watching her and Daniel as they move further away. The soldier stiffens his shoulders and his fingers tighten around the barrel.

Otto is by my side. He says something to the soldier and they laugh. All strength has left my body. I want to be sick. My stomach has turned to water. I feel my bowels loosen. Otto doesn’t put his hand over my mouth again. He knows I’m done, that my dry tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, gluing my words fast. I would fall to my knees if it weren’t for him holding me up. His pinching fingers are the only reality, his hot breath on my neck.

Mutely I watch Daniel help Sarah onto the train, handing up her case. I see her fear now, the trembling of her hands. She puts her arm around her mother’s hunched back. I stare at the flash of blue that is the hem of her coat. It’s all I can see of her. I remember holding the worn rub of wool between my fingers as she pulled the thin folds of it around me, so that we were pressed together inside its small blue tent. We’d fallen onto the forest floor and I’d felt my way beneath her clothes. The soft give of her lips as she’d opened them to me. The last time we were together. Others clamber up. Stumbling people, clutching at each other, bodies crammed in together. Dear God. How many can fit into one car? My eyes hurt with staring, but the patch of blue has disappeared.

SS walk up and down the platform, shoving people inside, sliding doors shut. There are no windows, just little slits in the doors, high up. I see fingers at the openings, eyes staring out. The train pulls away with a shriek of metal. Otto releases his grip and I stagger, hands flailing as I catch my stride. I’m running behind the train, chest out; my fist hits the side of the last car, my feet sliding at the edge of the platform, and I teeter on the brink, wanting to plunge onto the tracks, to fall into darkness.

The rumbling wheels fade into the distance, swallowed by ordinary sounds: the soughing wind in the trees, music of birds and a dog barking. The crowd disperses, talking in low voices. A soldier spits as I pass. The wet sticks and slides across my neck.

In the cart on the way back, our feet dangling over the edge, Otto sucks the side of his hand, and says quietly, ‘If you give yourself away again, I won’t be able to protect you. You’re lucky. I never said anything. Nobody knew.’

I hardly hear him. I’m thinking of Sarah and Daniel and their mother. I can’t imagine what it’s like in that train, shut inside darkness, standing like animals. I set my jaw, and turn my head away, staring at a row of poplar trees, pigs in a field. A castle rises above a distant copse, tall and elegant.

‘Your little Jewish bitch,’ he says. ‘She would have destroyed you in the end.’

The cottage looks as it always has from the outside: a dank ruin surrounded by brambles. But at the back, the door that we never used has been smashed open; it gapes on broken hinges; splintered wood flares like knives. Inside there’s the remains of a fire in the grate, torn, blackened pages curling in the ashes. The books and cards have all been burnt. The cups shattered. Shards of china and scraps of paper have been kicked about the rooms; singed blankets and clothes twisted among them. A candle rolls under my feet.
Death To Jews
crawls in large red letters over the parlour wall. Dribbles of red paint on the floor like blood. I kneel in the ashes, my face in my hands, and sob. And the thought is there in my head and it won’t go away. They think it was me. They think I betrayed them.

1941, Ukraine

We’ve been marching for days. My ankles and toes are rubbed raw. And the weather is turning bitter. I smell snow in the air, see it in the flat grey sky. The Ukraine is dreary. The long horizons don’t change however hard we march. And there are the same ragged pine forests we saw in Poland. The same poor farms. As we file through villages, they seem empty. And then I notice movement behind half-open doors and windows. People staring at us from the shadows, faces gaunt with hunger.

‘Bloody Stalin,’ Damaske says. ‘We’re lucky to be born German.’

I disagree with him. But I say nothing. I like Damaske. He is uncomplaining. A natural optimist. He has an open, ruddy face and green eyes. He’s built like a pack animal – short and sturdy with broad shoulders. He is always quick to share his cigarettes.

The road is almost impassable: rain turned it to mud and then the army trekked along it, convoys of tanks, horses and marching men churning it up. Now the wind has dried it into steep, hardened ruts. There are pot-holes big enough to half swallow a man. We see lines of Russian prisoners shuffling along in their tattered brown uniforms. The enemy. At first I’d stared at them, at these exhausted boys. They didn’t look so fierce. Some of them have straw stuffed inside their jackets and hats. Some wear huge wooden clogs instead of boots. We pass a burnt-out tank on its side, charred metal twisted into lumps. One of ours. There’s the stink of burning.

In a town we halt near a Red Cross tent and are given the order to stand down. Nurses draw cold coffee from a horse-drawn field kitchen and ladle it into our canteen cups. Three Messerschmitts go over with a roar, the black swastikas on the under-wings visible. We let out a cheer. The Russians have nothing to compete with the Luftwaffe. Damaske and I wander over to the ruin of a house and lean against a crumbling wall to sip our coffee and have a smoke. There is even a trickle of sunlight breaking through the grey.