Two o’clock.
Almost twenty minutes since the last shards of shrapnel had clattered like metallic rain across the windowsill. Perhaps the all-clear would sound in time to snatch at least a semblance of sleep.
Liese lay Lottie on the narrow fold-down bed they shared, starting up a soothing hum as she wrapped the thin blanket round the child’s not-plump-enough body.
‘The windows and the building have survived another onslaught, so that was lucky.’
She began to list the night’s blessings as Lottie chafed against the sudden quiet.
‘And the ban on Jews using the shelters saved us from a blackout trek, which was even luckier. You know Mummy hates the thought of going underground more than any silly old bomb crashing through the apartment.’
The final siren sang out; Lottie’s eyelids fell.
Liese eased gently away from the bed and crossed the few paces back to the window. The light show was over; the streets already disappearing back into the dark. Liese shivered as she looked down into the spreading blackness, although the night was warm.
Berlin without its necklace of lights was an oppressive place. Darkness fell on the city, solid and matte. The soft glow of street lamps was a memory. The roads and pavements were marked instead by phosphorescent paint whose spiky daubs reared like fangs. Stripes for kerbs, corners and crossings; zigzags for a flight of steps. Each sign roughly done and patchy, a trap for a too-quick foot.
Nothing in the blackout held the shape it should. Bodies shuffled past each other sexless and hunched, grunting on contact. Buses lumbered along with their windows tinted into slit-thin blue patches. War had turned Berlin subterranean. And suspicious. Even in daylight, nobody spoke in the street unless they had to. Communication had whittled down to nods and eye rolls, to covertly watching and quickly looking away. The Germany preened over by the radio and the headlines and the flag-choked parades wasn’t one Liese recognised. That one wore its head up and its shoulders wide. Liese’s Berlin was all shadows and tightening spaces.
Three o’clock.
She could hear the bedroom stirring. Another hour and her parents would be up, forced out of bed before they were ready, sitting at the age-scarred table, hoping for breakfast. Facing a far too long walk to the jobs that had swallowed their lives.
I can’t find a place in our workshop for them, I’m sorry – no one needs the level of attention Paul Elfmann’s presence would bring.
Liese had despaired when she read the first line of Frau Zahl’s response to the letter Michael had delivered. The second line, however, had offered the hope of a lifeline: a promise of help to secure her parents positions in a uniform factory happy to pay a pittance to desperate Jews. It was a hard fall for them, but Liese, aching at Lottie’s hungry cries, had stood firm against Paul and Margarethe’s tears and protests. She had pointed out the rapidly expanding forced-labour laws, which were already sending Jews to grub in quarries and at building sites and roadworks. ‘To work at jobs you won’t survive in.’ She had insisted, and held food back from them as a promise of what would come unless they listened, until they ran out of arguments.
Threats had pushed the Elfmanns out of the flat and into sparsely filled wage packets. Threats got them through days that left them too drained to bombard Liese with their old litany of complaints.
Exhaustion had aged Paul and Margarethe ten years in the one since the war had started. Lack of light in the factory shed had yellowed their skin and reduced Paul’s once bright eyes to peering. Margarethe’s inability to sew a straight seam had sent her to the damp potato mountains which passed for a work’s kitchen. Her slim fingers had grown lumpen and knotted and they split any gloves she tried to force over them. Their days were ruled by eight-hour shifts and a five-kilometre walk there and back that soon became a shuffle.
Liese had tried to get bus passes for them, not that they believed her, but none were available for Jews – ‘with a journey so short, they ought to be grateful’. Her stomach dropped every day at the sight of their blank faces and soured with guilt at what she had forced them to do. Then she looked in the empty cupboard and her stomach dropped further. Her parents were broken and Liese felt the weight of her part in that. If their misery meant Lottie cried with hunger for even one moment less, it was, however, a cross she would bear.
Food. The lack of it and the need for it dominated every waking hour. Liese’s fan of ration cards were as pretty as a paint chart and as much use at filling empty stomachs. The Party had put a well-regimented system in place to ensure Germany’s increasingly stretched resources were best used: blue cards for meat; green for eggs; yellow for fats; orange for bread; and pink for rice and tea and flour and oatmeal. It was a system capable of providing German citizens with a perfectly balanced diet. If only the cards Liese held weren’t stamped with a J. If only the shops were open to Jews for longer than the last scrabbling moments before the shutters slammed down for the day. If only the portions allocated to anyone but ‘honest Germans’ would feed anything bigger than a mouse.
Liese had mined every connection like a prospector after gold. Lottie’s smile had charmed the childless grocer’s wife: if Liese came to the shop early and tickled Lottie into a grin, she could leave a bag that would be filled up with vegetables when she returned later at night. The women whose sewing Liese took in shared a twist of sugar when they could, or a straw-wrapped egg. The women whose children she minded along with Lottie, while they toiled in the factories, did the same. Michael would pop up every week or two clutching a bag of apples, or a knuckle of pork, and no questions asked. She was grateful for all of it, but none of it was guaranteed.
There were days when all Liese could pull together was a handful of turnips and a dry loaf of bread so full of grit she was terrified Lottie would choke on it. She became a more inventive cook than any of the chefs whose meals she once ate without thinking. She became a gleaner, a collector of rosehips and dandelions and nettles that went into salads and soups that everyone hated and everyone wolfed down.
Whatever she did, it was never enough. Lottie’s eyes were a shade too big for her face, her arms and legs not properly covered. When the second word she spoke after Mama was hungry, Liese sank down and wept.
Four o’clock.
The bedroom door would open soon, the hungry mouths would appear. A hot drink might provide the illusion of a proper breakfast.
Liese collected the box of ersatz coffee that tasted of chicory and smelled burned when it brewed and went to the cramped kitchen. It was so early, at least one of the stove’s four flickering burners should be free. The corridor was bitterly cold, the stained oilcloth that covered it stung like ice through Liese’s thin shoes and its one light bulb had blown long ago. There was no milk, not that she would have given that to anyone but Lottie. There was a heel of yesterday’s loaf, a scraping of beet-bulked marmalade. That would do for Paul and Margarethe.
Hidden under the bed where Lottie lay sleeping was a muslin-wrapped square inch of cheese, a bag with two apples and some slivers of meat the black-market man swore was fresh rabbit. That haul would stay hidden until her parents were far away from the flat. It had cost Liese her last pair of earrings and would be gone within minutes. But it would fill Lottie up. It would pink her cheeks and wipe away the pinched hollows for a few hours, for a morning. For long enough to keep going from this day to the next.