The Prosperous Thief (18 page)

She shrugged and sat back in her chair. For a while neither said a word, then the archivist glanced down at her notes and continued. Evidently Renate had remained standing in front of the guard, staring into his face and goading him to hit her. ‘Hit me while I’m watching you,’ were her actual words. Her face was all hollows, she was little more than a sack of bones, yet suddenly in a single slick movement she lunged for the baton. The guard yanked his arm back; plastering his face was an icy smile. Renate apparently was unfazed. Still holding his gaze, she asked whether he believed in God. The German nodded in spite of himself.

It was Renate’s turn to smile.‘He’s got your number,’ she said.

Again she lunged, and this time – perhaps it was the mention of God – the guard was taken by surprise. The bar was in her hand, she was quick, had to be quick, and swung a calculated arc into his kidneys. It was a bull’s-eye hit and it brought the German to his knees. Other guards came running. Apparently the bullets hit her just a fraction of a second after the baton slammed into the man’s head.

This was how Renate Lewin died, spared the knowledge that her act of defiance ended the lives of eighteen other Jewish women.

‘Your mother could not have guessed,’ the archivist now says, watching Alice closely. Then more firmly, ‘Your mother was not to know.’

Alice is stumbling in her own mind. Everyone knew what brutes these Nazis were, her mother must have known there would be terrible consequences. And yet if she had known, surely she would she have acted differently. Surely she would have complied and thereby prevented those eighteen women from being killed. And surely she would have continued to comply and so lived out the war. Surely. Surely. Surely. Alice has heard so many stories that expose these impossible dilemmas, but nothing she knows will show her what to do.

‘Admire her,’ the archivist says. ‘Admire your mother. Hers was an act of extraordinary courage.’

‘And the woman who told you?’

‘She knew all too well that you had to be strong to survive the camps.Your mother’s courage helped her. It made her stronger.’

Alice fights a sense of righteousness, a sense she would have behaved differently in the same circumstances. But would her different behaviour have been better? And who is fit to judge in these matters anyway? Such questions are the stuff of Talmudic exegesis, but this is the real thing, and besides, the Talmud has never been an option for her. She shakes off the questions, best to keep it personal, she decides. So does this new information cause her to feel differently about her mother? And she finds herself smiling, for the truth of the matter is it does.

The archivist responds to the smile.‘And I haven’t told you the good news yet.’

The smile quickly disintegrates. There’s more? Please God, let there be no more.

‘Nothing distressing,’ the archivist quickly reassures. ‘Just a possible connection. In Melbourne, Australia. There’s a Henry Lewin living there, a German Jew like your parents. He arrived in 1951 with his wife and young son. A daughter, Laura, was born later. We learned about him through one of the
Kinder
who’s a second cousin of his wife. It’s just possible he might be a distant relative, it’s also possible he knew your father. He’s originally from Berlin, but like your father he ended up in Westerbork and later was transferred to Belsen.’ She pushes back her chair. ‘It’s up to you to decide whether to contact him.’

With that she hands Alice a copy of her file, including the contact details of Henry Lewin in Melbourne, Australia. She leads her to the stairs, shakes her hand and wishes her a pleasant stay in London.

The day had darkened when Alice found herself in the street again. It was tempting to read something symbolic in this given she’d only been upstairs for forty minutes, but more likely, she told herself, to be nothing other than a typical London day in October. And took comfort in so Phil-like a response, particularly with her nerves so gnarled and thin.

There was still an hour to fill before she was due to meet Raphe, an hour to digest the information and determine what to do. She had expected nothing new from her visit to the archive, this being her customary way of facing life ever since the end of the war when her parents had failed to appear. In a single afternoon all those years ago, the impossible chasm between hope and expectation had been cruelly exposed, and she was determined never again to confuse the two. But as she headed south through the Bloomsbury streets, she realised that for the first time in years she had lapsed and allowed herself far too much in the way of hope.

Her parents were gone, long gone, and she had always known it, yet the loss was as fresh as if the deaths had only just occurred. A great gaping channel had opened within her and she didn’t know what to do.

Her mind was all wind and wasteland; automatically she negotiated the lumpy pavements, automatically she avoided other pedestrians. She noticed nothing. Several minutes must have passed before she was aware of a voice, quiet at first and indistinct, emerging from the blustering in her head. Go home, it said. Then louder and more insistent: Go to all your homes. And once established it would not retreat, a huge, bristling imperative to reconstruct the past: to go back to Germany and put the pieces together, properly this time, then to Oxford and lastly to America. Relive and remake her whole life without any lurking hopes.

It was a flash of brilliant illumination, clear and so evidently right. Then a moment later it was gone and Alice no longer knew why she wanted to revisit her past. No longer knew anything at all. She stepped back from the footpath and leaned against a wrought-iron railing out of the way of other pedestrians. She reminded herself of the facts: she was in London, she was on her way to meet her son, and her parents were dead as they had always been. Cold, hard facts, no illuminations, just a harsh empty landscape with the unknown figure of Henry Lewin in Melbourne, Australia, lurking in the distance. She shook him off, looked about her, could find no familiar landmarks, latched on to a street name, consulted her map, couldn’t make sense of it. In the end she entered a small park and sat on a bench in a sheltered alcove. There she found herself longing for her husband – not her parents, her long-dead parents, but Phil, alive again and helping her decide what to do, Phil helping her as he had always done.

When Phil Carter first made his feelings known all those years ago in his peculiarly American invitation to ‘go steady’, Alice’s inclination had been to resist.You don’t know me, she had said, and you don’t know people like me. He had met every one of her arguments with precise and practical counter-arguments entirely in keeping with the engineer he was. But it was his coup d’état – ‘I make a career out of supporting buildings,’ he said,‘so supporting you should be easy’ – which had decided her. It was only after they were married that she realised how ridiculous his statement was, the type of support she required being of a vastly different kind to struts and concrete. Yet in his own stolid way he had stood by his word, certainly the support he gave her was no less reliable than that he cemented to buildings in trembling San Francisco. Now as she lingered in a Bloomsbury park she thought that if Phil were here he’d know what to do. Although, and more to the point, if Phil were still alive she would never have visited the archive in the first place.

‘It’s the past,’ he would have said. ‘And it’s over.’

It was Hannah Moser who had introduced Alice to Phil. The Mosers had known Phil’s parents for years, almost since their arrival in San Francisco. It was an acquaintance difficult to explain as the two couples had little in common. The Carters were people bereft of imagination, the wife as much as the husband: he owned a company which manufactured spare parts for vacuum cleaners and she did the books. They were reliable, predictable people who were confident of themselves and their values. Any crisis which required even a modicum of creative action would have sorely tested them, but in stable, affluent America they were ideally adapted to their environment. And their son was cut from the same cloth. One day Hannah invited the Carters for afternoon tea, and although Alice had made a prior arrangement to go to the movies, Hannah wanted her to meet Phil and insisted she change her plans.

Phil was exactly what Alice needed, so much so that Alice was forced to revise certain long-held opinions of her guardians, convinced as she was that they had engineered the match. Hannah and Jonathon had always seemed in a parallel universe when it came to parenting. Some parents are gauche, others are inept, but the Mosers simply did not acknowledge children as
children
– or so it had seemed to Alice.

This had been the case from the very beginning.Hannah would arrive home with clothes for Alice much in keeping with the grass-green beret style she favoured for herself. Alice suggested they go shopping together, but unfortunately it was not Hannah’s way. She would leave the house to buy food for the family and come home with a rainbow-coloured skirt and blouse for Alice. Alice with her German accent and German ways already stood out, how much worse in the clothes Hannah chose for her. She knew she had to appear grateful, but she also knew she couldn’t go to school looking as if she’d escaped from a circus. She learned from a classmate about the English system of hand-me-downs; all that was required was an older sister who was not too rough on clothes.Alice found an ideal substitute in a girl who lived down the street with no younger sister and a mother with good taste.

That fixed the clothes problem. But the Mosers did not understand about food either. Even with rationing their idea of a special tea was crumpets with sardines, so there was never any question of inviting a girlfriend home for tea. They always gave Alice exactly what they ate, even down to a glass of sherry before meals – a habit, incidentally, she still maintained. Then there was conversation: nothing was filtered or modified in deference to her age, and from 1941 when Jonathon was one of many dons recruited for the war effort, Alice knew as much – more – about the war than most adults. But the area of greatest difficulty was affection. It was not that the Mosers didn’t feel it, they were unsure how to show it. In the end they settled on the same expression for Alice as they used for their adored cat, Jeoffry. They would pat her and stroke her and chuck her under the chin, and without any warning would sweep her off her feet and swing her high in the air while singing silly tamperings of well-known songs like ‘Alice Alice give me your answer do, I’m half crazy all for the love of you’. It seemed to work for them and for the cat too, only Alice experienced any trouble. She remembered all too vividly how she would hug and kiss her own parents and clamber on their knees, but she couldn’t do this with the Mosers, not simply because they weren’t the hugging, kissing, clambering type, but because to give to them what she had given to her parents would have meant a serious act of betrayal.

Throughout the long war years Alice was careful to remain absolutely true to her mother and father. They were still in Germany and the danger worse than ever.And while in her dreams she might travel back to Germany and spirit her parents to safety on a daily basis, in reality she was helpless – except to be the best-behaved little girl in all of England in order to earn the safe arrival of her parents in Oxford.

To say she lived a childhood would be to deny its essence. She stage-managed childhood, and far from easy when first she arrived, given everything was so strange. The Mosers lived in a house not a flat. There were several heaters but they were rarely lit and the fire in the living room seemed to be perpetually in the dying embers phase. Hannah and Jonathon – they insisted being called by their first names – wore coats and gloves inside the house; for bed, they would remove their day clothes then pile more on. It was not as if they were poor, rather they approached the cold differently from Germans. It was January when Alice and Willi arrived and Alice was cold all the time, but particularly in bed. The Mosers had no quilts, just heavy rough blankets which never seemed to warm up. Like Hannah and Jonathon, soon Alice too was wearing a jumper over her nightgown, and normal socks beneath her bedsocks. But still she was cold. She hated making a fuss, kept telling herself that soon winter would be over and then she’d warm up. But that first winter in England was interminable and in the end she told Hannah how very cold she was. Later that same day Hannah produced a hot-water bottle with a knitted cover in faded purple. Off-centre and in brilliant green had been stitched ‘AL’ in a hand more accustomed to wielding a pen than a needle.

Gradually Alice learned how to manage; even when Willi enlisted in the British army and moved away she managed. She made friends and she copied them. And learning the language helped. In time she felt she had an English childhood off pat while remaining loyal to her German childhood – for how else to guarantee the safety of her parents? By the time she learned there were no guarantees and never had been, she was confined by her own standards of perfection and it was too late to change.