‘You’re pregnant? Are you kidding me? How could you be so careless? Don’t you know anything?’
Clearly, she hadn’t. Except that she had wanted André and she refused to regret the night they had spent together. How could she? He might have fooled her and betrayed them, but he had left behind a blessing. Gazing now into her daughter’s velvety eyes, the burning sky and broken buildings that had led to her coming were as hard to remember as the birth pains.
Liese hadn’t expected to fall so helplessly in love with her child. If she had only known how deep and immediate the bond would be, perhaps the pregnancy would have been less of a strain. If she had also known, as she announced the news to her parents in what now seemed the unimaginable comfort of Charlottenburg, how much worse their lives were going to get, she wouldn’t have bothered worrying over something as simple as pregnancy at all.
Liese stared round the cramped room which doubled as her bedroom and her workroom and the apartment’s only living space and opened onto a second one just as mean. Two rooms and that was it, for three – and now four – of them to live in. The whole apartment could have fitted inside the chequerboard hallway of her grandfather’s mansion, and it rang from dawn to dusk with her parents’ complaints. Not just about the size, although that was always where the muttering started, but about the peeling walls and the fraying carpets. About the indignities of sharing a bathroom and a kitchen with the occupants of other equally miserable sets of rooms. About the damp which clung to the walls even in the middle of summer, and the smell of decay which wafted through the windows from the refuse left piled up in the courtyard until it rotted.
Nothing had changed since the miserable December day when they had moved into the broken-down tenement that now served as their home. Paul and Margarethe wouldn’t make do; they wouldn’t make the best of things. They acted as if Liese had swept them out of Charlottenburg and into Cuxhavener Straβe on some inexplicable whim. As if she was the one depriving them of soft sheets and rose-scented soaps and all the little luxuries they couldn’t live without, that ‘a good daughter would get if she cared enough’.
‘Don’t they understand that this is partly their fault? That if they cause trouble here, there’s nowhere left for you to go?’
Michael had stood in the dank hallway that first afternoon, his hair dripping with snow, every muscle tensed as if he was ready for a fight.
‘It’s the shock. Leaving Bergmannkiez for Charlottenburg was one thing, but to find themselves having to live somewhere like this?’ She had smiled with an optimism she really wanted to feel. “They’ll calm down. They’ll get used to it. And I can manage.’
Liese didn’t believe her parents would adjust any more than Michael did, but her stuck-on beam had got him out of the door and back to the underground life his resistance activities meant he was now living. She knew if he had stayed, he would have picked a row with Paul, a row that Paul would be too arrogant to back down from and she would end up engulfed by. All she and Michael had been doing for weeks was fighting and the cause was always the same: her parents’ selfish, dangerous behaviour. Every time he had appeared in the reopened Charlottenburg house, he had paced the carpets bare. And stretched her patience as thinly.
‘Didn’t you explain that staying in Charlottenburg was meant to be temporary? Don’t they understand that you’ve already been here too long?’
After the first week, Liese had stopped answering. Her parents couldn’t – or, more likely, wouldn’t – understand a thing. In the fraught early-morning confusion of their arrival, Liese had begged them to be discreet. It was as much use as pleading with a hungry baby to stop crying. Paul had refused to be ‘cowed’; Margarethe had applauded his ‘bravery’. That first day, they had thrown open the shutters and strolled in the garden with no thought for who could be watching, and no amount of pleading would keep them indoors. Michael had acted like Liese hadn’t noticed their madness or hadn’t tried in vain to curb it.
‘Can’t you control them? They’ll be wandering down the streets and waving at the neighbours next. The Nazis have seized the salon. They’ve seized the Bergmannkiez house. They’re hunting for every last bit of Jewish wealth. Even if some snoop doesn’t tell tales, it won’t take long to track this estate down.’
‘Why are you telling me? I’m not the one sticking my head in the sand and still imagining I’m the toast of Berlin. But if you think you can get through to them any better, by all means go ahead.’
Liese had snapped. Michael had kept on lecturing and not listening. Their closeness on the night of Otto’s disappearance had vanished under the weight of old patterns.
‘The Nazis are swallowing up Jewish property like sharks at a feeding. If you won’t leave the city, at least let me find you somewhere less obvious than this.’
If you won’t.
She would have shouted at that, except there were already too many cross voices competing. Liese might have come to respect Michael’s convictions, but that didn’t mean she wanted to live with the judgement they trailed. When she had finally lost her temper and yelled that ‘not everything in the world was black and white – that sometimes it was grey and muddied’, he had simply looked blank. Liese had, nevertheless, gone on trying to reason with Paul and Margarethe. She had tried to remind them that this move was only step one; to persuade them to repack their cases and let Michael find them a different city or a countryside bolthole. Every time she mentioned leaving, they stormed through the house like tantruming children.
Michael came less and less; Liese couldn’t blame him. She knew his absence wasn’t because he didn’t care – that it was, in fact, a measure of how much he did. She knew that he was looking for somewhere safer for them all to stay; that she had to trust he would find such a place quickly. She grew steadily better at ignoring her parents, at holding her nerve and holding her tongue. By the second week in December, with the household still undisturbed, she began to believe Paul and Margarethe’s foolishness had gone unnoticed. She started opening up the rest of the mansion’s rooms, removing the covers from the carved and tapestry-covered furniture in the reception rooms and shaking the dust out from the brocade and silk drapes. She found enough silver candlesticks to soften the burgundy-papered dining room and even, to Margarethe’s delight, a cache of crystal jars containing still-fragrant bath salts. The long-neglected house was starting to feel almost like home. And then came the furious banging.
‘Security Police. Open up.’
Four men stood arranged on the steps, all in the unmistakeable green uniform. The one at the front, an officer from the flashes on his collar, was holding a clipboard.
‘You are?’
‘Liese Elfmann.’
The officer glanced up from his list. ‘You are not.’
‘I don’t understand.’
This time, his gaze was so direct Liese had to fight not to duck it.
‘You are a Jew. You are therefore Liese Sara Elfmann. If you had registered as instructed, you would have received your Jewish name and you would answer correctly. Move aside.’
He flung the door past her, nodding to the remaining policemen, who marched through on his command.