‘No, Karen: it wasn’t. You’ve lived too long carrying a fault that was never yours. Perhaps, yes, your birth was a catalyst for what came, but so was the war and my saving her and marrying her and bringing her here and a dozen other things I doubt even she could name. Your mother was badly damaged by her life. She was ill. But she loved you with every bit of her that could and that’s the truth.’
He got up and left the room before she could gather her thoughts up to speak. When he came back, he was carrying a cloth-covered blue book.
‘She was brave, Karen. All the battles she fought and yet she kept on going longer than most people I know would have managed, soldiers among them. Nobody talked about depression in the fifties and sixties. You pulled yourself up and got on with it. That was the language I had, that most doctors had. Or they gave you pills. She hated them; she wouldn’t take them properly. When she did, they stopped her functioning and made her paranoid. When she didn’t, it was like she had to live all her lives in one day. It was exhausting, for both of us. I never knew which Liese I was coming home to, or which one you had seen.’
‘Which is why Mrs Hubbard stepped in.’
Karen remembered the slap and squirmed. If her father knew, which he surely must, he had the heart not to mention it.
‘I know she interferes, but she was – and is – a lifesaver. But this isn’t about her.’
He held out the book. ‘I found this when your mother died. I’m not sure what to call it: a journal perhaps, or a scrapbook. She must have started keeping it not long after you were born. One of the doctors might have suggested it, to try and marshal her fears, or it was her own doing for the same end. I don’t know. I don’t imagine she intended either of us ever to see it, but it helped me. Eventually. I think it might do the same for you.’
Karen opened the flimsy cover and began turning the pages. There were cuttings pasted into it, thickly speckled with annotations and longer pieces of writing in both English and German.
Her father stopped her as she flicked through to the end.
‘You need to take time with it, follow it in order. My dictionary is on the bookcase if some of the German is harder than you can follow. I’ve been brushing up my skills.’
‘Why didn’t I find her book when you were in hospital and I cleared out the house?’
She knew the answer before he supplied it.
‘You gave it to Mrs Hubbard for safekeeping.’
‘I had to. It wasn’t something for stumbling over. And you would have got it, whatever happened to me. I’d written a letter to go with it, if my treatment didn’t work.’
He got back to his feet.
‘Sit with it now, as long as you need. I’ll be in the garden when you’re done. I want you to come to me when you are. It doesn’t make easy reading. But you’ll find her in there, Karen. And I hope you’ll find the forgiveness you need. For yourself, for me, if you want that. For her.’
She heard the scrape of the kitchen table and the whistle of the kettle long before she was finished. The light had faded outside, drawing Andrew in. He didn’t disturb her. Reading the scrapbook had taken a number of stops and starts: the entries were muddled and without any thread of time or narrative to link them. It took Karen an age to find a pathway and decipher a voice she could follow.
All the stuck-in clippings appeared to date from the early to late sixties. Their subject matter would have seemed wildly at odds with each other without Andrew’s brief description of Liese’s obsessions. They veered between highly prescriptive advice on all aspects of motherhood and childcare, and a whole series of articles reflecting the upsurge in the early 1960s in the demand to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. Every article was accompanied by scribbled thoughts and questions – about what made a good mother; about what made someone a murderer. As with the more personal, undated and untitled handwritten sections, their tone became more desperate as Karen worked her way through them.
There was a pattern to the fears but no discernible order in the way the pieces were put together. Sometimes articles were stuck on top of each other in a jumble of crying babies and new medications, as if her mother was overwhelmed by competing anxieties. Sometimes there was a grouping which suggested one obsession had dominated. Newspaper reports from the 1963–1965 Auschwitz Trials ran over half a dozen pages. The details of the charges presented, and the defences offered, were thickly underlined; the same questions about where the guilt lay scribbled over and over.
Karen found the longer entries, the ones where Liese had laid her soul bare, the hardest to read. They ran round and round in endless circles and were filled with a restless spirit that made her weep while she read them. Karen tried, but she couldn’t get through them all. The anguish in the loops Liese clearly couldn’t break out of was unbearable. The ever-present shadow of failure. The inability to trust herself as a mother, so caught up in the lessons of the past that a loudly crying child still meant danger. The knowing and not knowing she was safe, the inability to see soldiers as anything but a threat. It was little wonder she had always dreaded going to the base. That her mother could separate Andrew from the pack, Karen realised, said a lot about her father’s kindness and the strength of their marriage.
To Karen’s relief, not every page was so bleak. Every so often there was the trace of a lighter day. When her mother recorded personal milestones and celebrated them.
My clever baby walked today. My precious girl smiled and lifted her arms when she saw me.
She has so many words, every day a host of new ones – they tumble from her. She is the cleverest little thing.
How will I ever be able to tell her off? She is such a little monkey, into everything she shouldn’t be, and then she looks up at me with that grin and my heart melts.
Her mother had captured these moments in a rounder script and surrounded her delight with garlands of beautifully drawn roses. Karen began hunting these entries out, combing through the pages for glimpses of herself and of happiness.
Her father’s carefully phrased guidance proved right. The scrapbook was soaked in pain and hard to read. It was clear that her mother believed, although she could not, or would not, coherently explain it, that her actions had knocked the world off-kilter. That she was a danger to her daughter. That the crime she had committed, and the ones she judged herself guilty of, came with a price attached; that one day the universe would demand payment. There was paranoia and terror imprinted on every page. It was a side of her mother Karen knew was there but had never wanted to see, no matter how much closer it brought the real Liese.
It also wasn’t the whole story. Karen found another woman inside the writings. One with a quick mind and a full heart. With a determination to understand what had created the horrors she had been plunged helplessly into, horrors that had rewritten the happy life she had expected to live. Her mother was plagued with demons but she was also, as her father had said and Karen had felt since she first heard Lottie’s story, determined and brave.
Have I found forgiveness?
Karen stared out of the window at the dark edges of a lawn which was as immaculate as the one at her childhood home. She knew her father, who was still waiting quietly in the kitchen until she was ready for him, hoped the answer to that would be an easy ‘yes’. The truth was, however, more complex.