Liese was glad of the respite: the shop and its adjoining workroom was a simpler place without them. The Herbers were good, generous people, but they were also gossips and inquisitive, and sometimes the balance tipped too far the wrong way.
She glanced at her watch. Five o’clock and dark as night outside. There was only one more order to prepare, ready for making up on Monday, then she could close and slip away before either of her usual escorts had a chance to appear. She was too tired tonight to be much use as company.
Liese stretched the fabric along the cutting desk and marked off the lengths with tailor’s chalk. She could lose herself for hours like this, even when her eyes and shoulders were drooping; that much at least hadn’t changed. Even through her time as Suhren’s seamstress, the process of assembling the building blocks of a dress had never lost its capacity to absorb and calm her; had never lost its magic. Carving straight lengths of material into intricate pieces, turning them from flat to full so that the finished garment would cling and swing and transform even the thinnest body. It remained magic, because this is theatre. Although that wasn’t strictly true anymore, or at least not in the way her father once meant.
Liese traced the pattern onto the cloth, struggling to picture Paul spinning his spells in Berlin’s newly revived but battered and shortage-hampered fashion industry. There was little in it he would recognise, or that she could imagine him wanting to be part of. None of the names who once ruled it had come back from the exile or the hell they’d been sent to. The extravagant dresses Haus Elfmann was once famous for were museum pieces, the shows they put on a myth. Despite the extravagant promises made by morale-boosting magazines, silk and taffeta and crêpe de Chine had become the stuff of dreams, along with unlimited flowers and perfume-thick air and spectacle.
Post-war Berlin was a divided city, hacked into four political sectors in 1945 by the victorious Allied powers and into two sharper, more obvious divisions by money – or, more accurately, the lack of it.
The poor, a rapidly growing class, were hungry and cold. They were stuck in queues, surviving from day to day on scraps of food and scraps of coal, with no sense that the war they had lost had ended. The rich, however, who had salted their fortunes carefully away and were bolstered now by the flood of Americans and their dollars into the city, had re-embraced the social whirl. Parties lit up embassies and refurbished hotels; partygoers chased glamour from any fashion house that could get back on its feet and supply it. Competition was cut-throat, customers were fickle; resources were limited and ingenuity prized. The last days of Haus Elfmann, which had demanded a creativity from Liese that the old-style designers would have found horrifying, had proved to be of more value than any lessons in haute couture she had learned.
In the year since she had secured a job at the Herbers’ dressmaking shop, Liese had retrained her hands and eyes to learn the language of new materials. Slippery acetates that ran away from the needle; wool mixtures that were too cardboard-stiff to fold and tuck. She had also learned to adapt her designs. Dresses no longer came elaborately sculpted with knife-edge pleats and intricate gathers; there weren’t the supplies to create them. Women with new responsibilities and less certainties in their worlds no longer needed morning dresses and afternoon dresses and a week’s worth of evening ensembles. Except for the wealthiest, the days of excess had gone. Liese didn’t mourn them. The Herbers, however, did and their ambitions far outweighed the little shop that had fallen into their hands when the war had left it ownerless.
It took Liese less than a week to realise that, despite their pretensions, the Herbers were struggling and the shop’s existence was threatened. Glad of something to do that filled her days and asked nothing of her but her skills, Liese had risen to the challenge.
She plundered their dwindling fabric stores and spliced together mismatched fabric ends, whipping up skirts and blouses in what some might call patchwork but she described as ‘rainbow-arc outfits’. She encouraged Herr Herber to open up the gloomy store window and filled its space with colour. Women tired of grey and bored with narrow skirts that hobbled their knees began to find their way to Budapester Straβe. Liese watched as they sighed in front of the mirrors and ran hands down bodies that rationing had turned boyish. She worked offcuts into overskirts nipped in with sashes and bulked out with padding that restored war-starved hips and waists, and used inserts and darts to create blouses stiff with the illusion of volume. Women left the shop feeling like women.
Herr Herber saw the order book fill and began to introduce Liese as Rumpelstilzchen, daring clients to bring in any fabric they could salvage for ‘darling Frau Ettinger, who truly can weave gold out of straw’.
‘Why does he call you that? Surely he knows your name is Elfmann?’
‘No, he doesn’t. Why would I use a Jewish name if I don’t have to? Germany was beaten, that’s not the same as safe.’
It was a clever answer to Andrew’s confused question, but it wasn’t the truth.
Liese wasn’t afraid of being Jewish. She wasn’t afraid of anything anymore, except memories. She could be Elfmann anywhere else, but not in the dressmaker’s. Saying her parents’ name there was impossible. Either no one would know it in this business where everyone should, or, worse, it would be recognised. Some well-meaning soul would reveal the unthinkable and fill out that last image Liese held of Paul and Margarethe walking away with a camp name and a too detailed nightmare. So, at work, she was Ettinger.
Andrew accepted her reason, as she had known that he would: he was too horrified by the whole business of the camps not to. She wished she could so easily stop the rest of his questions. Now that she was no longer in the hospital and seemed more sure of herself, he was desperate to burrow into her history. To know every detail about her family, about her life before, about the dreams she had dreamed there. ‘So I can get to know you better.’ As if the Liese then and the Liese now were the same person.
He means well. He cares about you. They both do.
She picked up her scissors as her conscience pricked.
Michael and Andrew: a year and a half out of hospital and she still hadn’t shaken the pair of them off. The truth was, she didn’t want to. Somewhere along the way, their concern for her had stopped being a burden and she had learned to value them both, despite, or perhaps because of, how different the two men were.
Andrew was the simpler of the two and his company was impossible not to enjoy. He was well read, he had an eye for art that she appreciated, and a way of approaching the world without judgement that carried a genuine warmth. They had fallen into the habit of walking together at the weekends, watching Berlin reshaping, sometimes talking, sometimes not, or sitting in one of the dozens of cinemas that had popped back up, both happy to be lost in other people’s stories.
Liese had come to like Andrew very much. She knew he had fallen in love with her; in a different world, it wasn’t impossible that she could have fallen in love with him. He was good and kind, and patient. Liese knew that he would do everything in his power to make her happy and he would be very easy to make happy in return. He knew that she was broken, that she had far less to give than he deserved and it didn’t matter to him. What was it he had said? ‘You like me – I know you do. And you trust me. That could be enough, if you let it, to make into a good life. I have love enough for both of us for now; one day, if you let yourself, you might just catch me up.’