From anyone else, that would have sounded needy, or weak. Coming from Andrew, somehow it didn’t. And that was the problem. He was such an honourable man. He deserved so much more than a woman who couldn’t work out why she was still living.
As for Michael… He was in love with her too and that was far harder to ignore. There was such a wealth of history between them, good and bad. Liese had tried to push him away, but he kept coming back. She couldn’t pretend anymore that he meant nothing to her. Sometimes she thought she sought out Andrew’s company the most because she couldn’t trust herself to be alone too long with Michael. He had a way of looking at her that went straight through to her heart, but her heart was still too broken to find room for that.
A wave of exhaustion washed over her, the way it so often did when she tried to puzzle out her future. She put down her scissors and ran her hand over the blue wool she had already cut, noticing as she did so that it was the same deep shade the doctor had worn under his white coat on the day he had discharged her.
‘You’re well enough to leave us and we need the bed.’
It was the last days of Ravensbrück’s liberation all over again. She would have argued, if she thought for a moment he would have listened to her any more than the American doctors had then. Or if she had had anything better to say than ‘I don’t want to leave here; I can’t deal with the world.’ Nobody could deal with the world the war had left them with and she was a picture of health compared to most of the wretches the hospital admitted. The doctor knew what had happened to her; there was nothing he could offer to heal that wound but pity. Liese didn’t want that from him; she didn’t want that from anyone. All pity did was stoke the anger that still crouched in her stomach.
So much rage, constantly churning inside her. Liese stared at the desk, at her scissors and pins neatly waiting and wondered why, when it reared, she didn’t glow red or burn everything she touched. Andrew couldn’t see it, or chose not to see it, but Michael could. That was the danger with Michael – he saw everything she was. And didn’t hide from telling her.
‘Maybe the anger is good – maybe it’s what keeps you going?’
As if she wanted to keep going.
Then why do you? Why don’t you end it like you planned?
Up it popped again: the question she could never quite answer. That always wriggled on into: It doesn’t need to be the lake: there’s cars to walk under; there’s scissors to cut wrists with – there’s a dozen ways.
It was two years since she had last kept her vigil over the water, joining Lottie her only goal. Two years since she had swayed on the train platform, and yet here she was, still living her life. Something was pushing her to keep on breathing, but try as she might, she couldn’t work out what.
When the hospital had discharged her, Michael and Andrew were there, waiting to take over. She wouldn’t let them. She had allowed Michael to use his connections and help her find a place to live but had refused to move into his block. She had waved Andrew away when he worried that she was too weak yet to find work. She had hauled herself off to the new tailoring quarter springing up round the Kurfürstendamm and sold her talents to the Herbers with far greater success than she had managed with the wartime businesses who had chased her away. She had carved out a life and she was still inching into it. She still didn’t understand why living it mattered.
For Andrew and Michael perhaps?
It was part of the answer, but it couldn’t be all of it, no matter how much she valued their affection. No matter that she knew the love they wrapped her in was more than so many people had.
Post-war Berlin was a battered place, its heart pounded by bombs, its streets crammed with the lonely and the desperate. Liese passed them as she walked between her new home in Seydlitstraβe and the Budapester Straβe shop. Starving children, whose feet were bound in blanket strips whatever the weather, whose faces were sharpened like weasels. Lines of rag-bundled women clearing rubble from Berlin’s ravaged buildings, from around the cellars too many still lived in. Women too hungry to manage such physically punishing, pitifully paid work; too hungry not to. With no one left to love or be loved by. Women who would have envied Liese’s life as much as the wretches stuck in the camp that Suhren snatched her away from.
Liese knew how lucky she was, but it was hard to feel grateful when she was so filled with guilt.
‘Excuse me, are you open?’
She had been so engrossed in picking over her life, she hadn’t heard the bell ring. If Herr Herber found that out, his pale face would turn purple.
Liese straightened herself up and smiled at the dark shape letting the cold in.
‘Yes, for another half hour.’
Never hurry a customer, my dear: there’s not enough wealth in the city for us to rest on our laurels.
Frau Herber’s lesson chimed louder than the doorbell had.
‘And longer, of course, if you need it.’
The woman came further in, shaking frosty raindrops all over the floor.
‘Perfect. It will be weeks before I am in the city again and I wanted to see about placing an order.’
She waved her sodden umbrella at Liese and didn’t offer any thanks when Liese took it.
‘It’s such tremendous luck that I found you. There I was, treating myself to a cake in the sweetest café on the Kurfürstendamm, and in walks a woman in the most darling ruby-red coat. Of course, I had to ask her where she got it and she, naturally, was quite thrilled that I did. And then to find out that the dressmaker who made it is only five minutes away and my dear Henkie so desperate for me to have something special for the winter. Well, this was clearly meant to be.’
On and on she went, in a tone her breathy delivery clearly intended to be charming but that hit all the wrong stresses.
Liese was barely listening. She had struggled to listen to a single word since the woman had stepped from the threshold into the shop’s buttery light. Her throat was so tight, she couldn’t have spoken even if the woman had wanted her to. All she could think was: How can she look so ordinary?
The clothes were different. The coat the woman wore was Loden-green and lumpily belted rather than a flowing black cape. Her hat had a feather set at its centre, not a swastika pin. But nothing about the heavy figure had changed in four years. The square-chinned face still glowed with health, the cheeks turned as ruddy by the November wind as they had been that long-ago and yet so recent bitter February. The eyes, for all the effort made to widen them with pencil flicks, still sank like currants into the doughy skin. The hair was smartly rolled and not so tightly drawn back, but it was just as brassily blonde as the strands that had once poked out from under the sharply peaked cap. She was a first-class Aryan poster girl, even out of uniform, and every inch of her face and form had been photographed in a moment three years ago and printed on Liese’s memory ever since.
Liese couldn’t speak, she could barely breathe, but the guard carried on, oblivious.
‘And I do so need a new coat, a properly tailored one. I love my babies, I truly do, but…’ She patted her middle with a sickeningly coy smile. ‘Well, they’ve hardly been kind to my waistline.’
‘Babies?’
The word splintered as it fell.
The guard swelled with pride. ‘Twins – two girls, if you can believe it. Such a shock and such a handful. Both Daddy’s little darlings, of course. It would be a lot to manage for most people, but my Henkie is such a good provider. He’s the mayor of our town and so well respected. Fürstenberg, that’s where we live. It’s an awfully pretty place, about an hour or so outside the city, although I doubt you will have heard of it.’