Berlin, July–November 1938
Why was she torturing herself like this? What was the point?
It was July, the summer season was in full swing; in any other year, the book would be bursting with fittings. This year, page after page had stayed blank, the few orders recorded there sitting as awkward as ink blots.
Liese flicked through them, as she had done last night and the night before. A day dress for Frau Posen. An evening gown for Frau Kohlmeier. Three more entries that were equally reticent. No jackets trimmed to match the dresses. No coordinating hats and gloves. No beaded capes or chiffon wraps in a week’s worth of colours. A handful of orders, all specifying plain cuts and pared-back trimmings. Haus Elfmann’s clientele was not simply shrinking, it was afraid to show off any traces of wealth.
She closed the book and switched off the lamp. The accounts were waiting, but she couldn’t bear to look at them. Two years ago, even with the loss of the Hertie account, no one at Haus Elfmann had worried about the salon’s financial security. Money was there to be spent; there was always plenty more to replace it. Now, those days felt like a lifetime ago. The banks had withdrawn credit in April; their last backer had swiftly offered his regrets. Liese had slashed the wages bill to the bone, but the red numbers kept rising.
All the hours she had spent in this office crowded round her. Listening to Paul daydreaming collections. Watching Otto pore over the budgets that brought her father’s fantasies to life. The salon’s rhythms had once seemed as unshakeable as the seasons they followed. ‘I don’t want to direct the salon. I want to be its chief designer.’ Was it only two years since she had said that? Now here she was, trying to hold the whole house together in hands far too young for the task, spread thinner than tracing paper and knowing barely half what she needed.
She wasn’t balancing the weight alone, not entirely. There was a handful of seamstresses still working, women who had never worked anywhere else and were stamped through with loyalty to the salon as deeply as she was. Who, like Liese, had never imagined their future to lie anywhere else. And there was still Otto. He did his best to keep the wheels turning, but, with Adefa tightening its grip on the industry, he spent more days on trains, criss-crossing the country grubbing for suppliers, than he did in the salon.
As for Paul… Liese rubbed eyes that ached more than an eighteen-year-old’s should. He hadn’t replaced her, although he had threatened to. She hadn’t reacted when he dealt with her ‘insubordination’ in his office by ignoring her; she was too used to that treatment for it to matter. When he finally asked her why she was still coming in every day even though she wasn’t wanted, she had told him the truth.
‘I love the business as much as you. It’s my family; it’s what you brought me up to believe was important. If you won’t walk away from it, neither will I.’
He hadn’t questioned her commitment again after that, but nowadays he came to the salon in a rush and tore through his visits. His behaviour was erratic. One day he would be close-mouthed and secretive, squirrelling away money in padded brown envelopes when he thought she wasn’t looking. The next, he would be loud and demanding. He was never listening. He was always ‘too busy’ to consider what now or to review empty ledgers. He was maddening and exhausting and no help to anyone.
‘I’m best used as an ambassador; you and Otto can manage the shop.’
He threw the line out like a compliment or a carefully considered decision, refusing to admit he was as frightened of the future as her, refusing to face it. Liese knew all too well that if Paul stood still for a moment, the way the days forced her to, the silence would stick to him.
The salon was running down, wearing out piece by piece like a tired old watch. There was no more hushed chatter in the public rooms, no more shushed babble backstage. The workrooms were frozen. There were no hissing irons, no clattering scissors, no pulleys creaking muslin-shrouded dresses like clouds across the roof. The curtains in the dressing rooms bloomed dust in their pleats; the gilt mirrors in the showroom sprouted tarnished patches like age spots. Memories were all that made up the salon now, as easily pulled out as pins. The canopied front door opened so little its hinges had stiffened. Their last customers sat at home and summoned, turning Liese into a peddler, hawking her patterns and her ribbons through back doors and garden gates.
‘I’m not selling.’
Paul’s repeated refusal continued to ring through the hallways, not that anyone heard. Not that there was anything left to sell, beyond a building and a tattered idea. For all Paul’s bravado, and whether he chose to believe it or not, the Party had still ground the Elfmann business to dust.
So they can remove us. So they can lift us out of our lives…
Michael had been proven right and these days was involved with the resistance deeper than ever. Gone with his comrades far more than around, even though Liese needed him, if only to share her fears. She didn’t bother him with that anymore: the demands of the struggle always won over the whims of fashion, and how could she blame him for making that choice? Liese lived in the same battered reality as Michael: she woke up most days wondering how dresses could possibly matter.
But I have to keep it all going because what else can I do?
She couldn’t imagine what a life without the salon meant. As her father’s heir, she had expected to live outside the narrow roles that most women of her social position inhabited. She had certainly never yearned after the purely domestic kind of life that the Nazis proclaimed kept women happy: a home, a husband, children – nothing more. And now, even if she had wanted that, the men she had once mixed with had either disappeared or, with her heritage, wouldn’t look twice at her.
There is nothing left but the salon, so the salon must keep going.
She told herself that every day to get herself out of bed, to paper over the truth that the salon no longer mattered, that the world she once inhabited had splintered. That every circle her life had overlapped was slipping away. Clientele; workforce; the fashion community whose origins she had never spared a thought for before the Party changed the rules of ownership and belonging.
As Otto had predicted, Hertie’s renaming had been only the start. Business after business had been wrenched out of Jewish hands, or been defamed and ruined. New plaques swarmed across stores and salons. Old owners disappeared as legacies that should have endured down the years were plucked away or left to wither. Faces familiar since childhood had vanished overnight, taking their skills to London or to America, or to anywhere religion wasn’t the first question asked.
‘We could follow. With our reputation, we wouldn’t be starting from scratch. Look how well others have done.’
Otto had kept pushing; Liese had kept hoping that Paul would listen, although she no longer bothered adding her voice to the argument. Instead, as fashion house after fashion house closed and reopened, all shiny and German, and still no one came for Haus Elfmann, Paul took it as proof that the salon was invincible.
‘Down they all go and look at us standing.’
Some days, Liese wondered if he was going mad.
The clock on the desk struck ten.
She should go home. She was so tired, more tired than she had ever been through the sleepless nights a show demanded. Sitting now, alone in the dark, Liese could have cried for those days and their nail-biting bustle. They were gone. Autumn/Winter 1937 had been the salon’s last showcase, although no one knew it until the day itself dawned. The fear, the excitement, the rituals, the weeks and weeks of work, all that ran on the same. But, this time, invitations went unanswered and no one requested tickets, not even Agnes Gerlach. Helena Stahl, who was still battling to do her job in the publicity department, didn’t tell anyone that. As she didn’t tell anyone that she had been forced to pay the invisible-on-the-day journalists to attend. She had said nothing, until the moment of opening clicked by and the door stayed firmly shut.