She pointed to the tracks and pulled away so fast her head spun and her knees buckled. He caught her as she slipped.
‘Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do. I’m not the judge here. But I could be a friend. Could we agree on that much?’
I don’t need another man in uniform who won’t listen to what I need; who won’t mind his own damn business.
But her head was whirling and so was the platform and she couldn’t find the words she needed to push him away.
Fourteen
Karen
Berlin, May 1990
Michael welcomed Karen back into his home as politely as he had done the day before. He made no mention of their previous conversation, so neither did Karen. He poured the coffee that was already waiting, he cut a cake that was clearly freshly baked and he talked without offering her any pauses.
‘Liese told me her story because I pushed her to do it. Her narrative was emotionless and full of gaps, as if it had happened to someone else. I can see in your face you hoped for more, Fraulein Cartwright. So, I promise you, did I. What I have given you is all I have. Her pain was too raw; whatever trust she had left in the world was gone. She wanted to be left alone. It was me who wanted her to stay, who needed her.’
Markus had continued to translate for his father as he had done before, watching Karen while he did so. He was waiting, Karen knew, for her to do what Michael apparently hadn’t been able to with her mother and push back. Michael had given her so little she barely knew where to start. He had handed her a pencil sketch with no colours, all outlines and nothing filled in.
Liese’s sewing skills had taken her out of Ravensbrück; the Nazis’ retreat in the face of the Russian army had put her back in. She had returned to Berlin alone, weakened and ill. Andrew had found her at the train station, where he was acting as some kind of army liaison point for refugees and returners. He had taken her to a hospital and Michael had tracked them down there. Two years after that, she and Andrew had married. That was the entirety of what Michael had said, but he knew more – Karen could see it. He was wary, prepared for a challenge, prepared to defend himself.
Markus was right: his father was clever. Well, so was she. He was ready for questions about the end of the war; that didn’t mean they were the ones she should ask.
‘What was she like, before all this, when she was young? Were you close then?’
His smile came from nowhere and there he was: the young man in the photograph. It was all Karen could do not to gasp.
‘Close doesn’t seem a big enough word. We had a bond stronger than siblings. Your mother and I grew up together, our fathers were old friends and worked like brothers together in the salon. They had the same plan for us: Liese would have Paul’s role as head designer; I would take my father’s position on the technical side. And then the Nazis put paid to that. The salon suffered, our families suffered and so did the relationship between Liese and I. But whether we were in step or couldn’t see one thing the same, the Liese I knew was never less than determined. She ran Haus Elfmann almost single-handedly before she was eighteen. She was fiercely protective of Lottie and so determined to be a good mother – the kind she had never had. Her relationship with her parents was a distant, unhappy thing. Liese was adamant her child would have better.’
He fell silent. Karen wanted to cry and didn’t know who most needed her tears: the little girl who had died before Liese could mother her the way that she wanted, or the little girl Liese had left.
It was a moment before she realised Michael had picked up his story.
‘… the girl I found in that hospital in 1945 was changed. She was brittle and angry, with tight walls around her. I guessed something must have happened to Lottie, but I had no idea about the way she had died. How could I? Even with the horrors we were starting to hear about, how could I have imagined something so brutal happening to a little girl?’
He stopped, blinked rapidly; shook himself and went on. ‘I suppose I thought Liese was suffering from shock, like so many of the survivors were. You have to understand what a terrible time it was, those first months after the war. People were trying to piece their lives together out of bombed homes and scattered families. Everyone had somebody missing; everyone was searching. Very few found happy endings.
‘When Liese got back to Berlin, she must have assumed her parents were dead or, at best, stuck somewhere a long way from Germany. Given the resistance work I was doing, she can’t have expected me to have survived. I was the same. I was looking for her but without much hope. I had a whole list of comrades I couldn’t trace and not even the right names for most of them. I didn’t have much hope of anyone. And then I saw Liese’s photograph at the station, with Andrew’s name and phone number scribbled underneath it. I have never believed in God, but that felt close to a miracle.’
‘Was she glad to be alive?’
The question popped into Karen’s head and out of her mouth and, perhaps because it was simple enough for her to put it to him directly, its asking took Michael by surprise.
‘No. She wasn’t.’
He stopped, tried to pick up the sentence and stopped again, his face etched with pain. He closed his eyes and was clearly drifting away.
‘Michael…’
‘Let him go where he needs to, Karen. Give him a moment.’ Markus reached over and took her hand. ‘I know you need answers – let him find them in his own way.’
Michael looked as if he had fallen asleep, but his eyelids were fluttering and his fingers were clenched. There was a frailty about him that was suddenly frightening.
Karen knew she had no choice but to wait.
‘Did you recognise Suhren when he spoke to you?’
Liese knew what Michael wanted to hear: Yes, I knew him and he knew me and he saved me because of it. That implied kindness, a recognition of the dreadful act done to her and a desire to somehow balance it. It was the simpler answer, far easier to explain than: I didn’t remember him at all and his saving me was a whim, a sop to his own monstrous ego. She couldn’t begin to articulate all the twists and turns in that, so she gave Michael the yes that he wanted.
She was exhausted. From Michael’s questions, from his apologies, from his neediness, and from Andrew’s. They both wanted so much more than she could give. Andrew desperate for her smile; Michael desperate for her story; both of them craving some sign of her affection. All Liese wanted was silence. Nothing felt real; nothing mattered. Trying to put the horror of Lottie’s killing into words had almost choked her. But Michael wouldn’t stop asking about the camp, or apologising and begging her forgiveness.
Liese didn’t blame him – she really didn’t. She had said those exact words, ‘I don’t blame you’, and meant them. She couldn’t finish the sentence; she couldn’t tell him that the only person at fault was her, because whose job was it to protect Lottie if not her mother? She couldn’t understand how Michael could still have questions. Why ‘they broke her neck and threw her into the lake’ wasn’t enough for him. Why he couldn’t understand that everything had ended there, at the gates. It wasn’t as if he could bear the truth.