A Parachute in the Lime Tree (16 page)

He stood up and walked the length of the room, pretending to examine the murky prints that lined the walls.

‘Ah, what’s the use,’ she said eventually. ‘You could just as easy make up a name as tell me the truth. She’s a sweetheart, this girl?’

He felt himself nod, though he wondered what Elsa would make of the description. When he was sure he was in control of himself, he blurted it out, ‘Her name is Elsa Frankel.’ Now that it was out in the open, it seemed possible – likely even – that he would find Elsa. Gradually, a weight was lifting from him.

Meanwhile, Miss Effie had moved on.

‘The first thing you’ll see of Wicklow is two hills: pyramids, both of them, a large and a small. What comes after them, I couldn’t say. We’ve no call for maps of the here and now in this house. You’d want to go into town for the kind of thing
that gives you names and distances and that sort of palaver. O’Connell Street, I suppose: our own bit of Paris. Turn left when you get to the gate, pass the Green, cross the river and look for an Englishman stuck up on a pillar with his nose in the air.’

She described bridges and stations and streets, and he became enormously confused, losing track of which was which. He got particularly lost when she started talking about a swastika and a laundry. Whatever it was seemed to perturb her greatly but he could think of no possible connection between the two.

All this was enough to secure him a room at the top of the house. Ranjit was no longer hostile but neither was he interested in conversation and they tramped in silence together up the stairs. Oskar laid out his little pile of possessions on the bed and jotted down in his journal some of the instructions Miss Effie had given him. He’d no idea how much maps cost, but deep in an inside pocket of Desmond Hennessy’s coat he found some copper coins and a couple of larger, silvery ones. He wasn’t sure what they would buy, if they still bought anything at all, but it seemed another small stroke of luck. Later that morning, he strode out into a world where Elsa could only be a day or two away.

Oskar turned left out of the gate, and followed the street across a hump-backed bridge until it widened out into a garden square bustling with bicycles and trolley buses and the odd spluttering motorcar. A bus trundled past. Gold Flake, it said. There was a grand hotel whose entrance was guarded by two torch-bearing statues and, on the other side, a park. He thought of the Tiergarten, where the trees had been replaced by burlap strung over metal poles. It seemed astonishing that there could still be a park. The flowerbeds were as neat as Mutti’s samplers, embroidered onto close-cut lawns. Once he was through the park gates, he came up against a stream of schoolgirls in navy blue gymslips. One of them turned and gave him a wave, like she was rubbing a small mark from a window. The little nun accompanying them clapped her hands and the girl fell back in line. When they reached a bandstand, the nun began to arrange the girls in height order, and it dawned on him that they were a choir. He didn’t like choirs, so he walked on. It was when Emmi joined the choir that the trouble started.

She’d joined the BDM along with all her friends, and for a couple of years she remained unchanged, still laughing at the fervour the others showed for the Fatherland. When the choir trip came up, she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to go but Mutti persuaded her to give it a try. When she returned to Berlin, they met her at the station. She was all gasps and exclamations, and they could get no sense out of her at all. She said she had a story to tell, insisted it get a proper airing, so they all sat down at the little table in the parlour while Mutti fed her coffee and cake, and Oskar whittled away at a stick.

When she was ready, she stood and clasped her hands together, just like Mutti did when she was about to burst into song. ‘We went up to Berchtesgaden,’ she said.

She whispered the name, as though it was some magic kingdom. He remembered Mutti tapping the palm of her hand up and down on the table in delight. They’d been taken there, Emmi said, in the hope that the Führer would come and greet the wellwishers outside after his lunch, as he did now and then.

‘Oh Mutti,’ she sighed, ‘the weather was dismal. It was so disappointing. All the way up the mountain, the rain was so heavy we could hardly see anything at all. But when we reached the Berghof, the sun just burst out from behind the clouds. Everything shining, like glass.’

Mutti crossed herself quickly. ‘Go on.’

‘I was happy enough as it was, the rain having cleared. But then a door opened.’

It must have been around then that Oskar’s knife slipped. He remembered Mutti drawing out a handkerchief from her pocket and waving it in his direction without once diverting her attention from Emmi. He’d wrapped the handkerchief tight around his thumb and folded it over several times but still the blood seeped through.

Emmi no longer seemed to be talking to them at all but describing some vision that was revealing itself to her as she spoke. ‘It was the Führer, Mutti. But dressed, well, like Vati or someone. Just like an ordinary man. So humble; just a grey suit with a felt hat. We all cheered and he raised his hat at us. He seemed to be about to go back through the door when one of his attendants came over and asked where we were from. He must truly love Berlin, Mutti, because when he heard he insisted on speaking to us.’

Mutti was nodding vigorously. ‘Of course he does, my darling. Berlin has a special place in the Führer’s heart.’

Emmi barely seemed to hear what Mutti was saying. ‘He brushed against a shrub, and the cloth on that shoulder was sprinkled with raindrops. And then, he stopped in front of us.’

Oskar remembered how curious it was that the story no longer seemed to be Emmi’s story at all. It was as though the day had been memorised and sealed so that it had become part of some other, bigger story.

‘When he saw me, standing there holding Papa’s camera, he offered to pose for a photograph with the others. I was pleased, of course, but disappointed too because I would miss being in the picture. Can you believe it, Mutti? Not a moment’s hesitation. Right away, he turned round to one of his staff members and asked him to take the photograph so that I could be in the picture too.’

Oskar recalled Mutti shaking her head in wonderment at the depth of the Führer’s feelings for his people, at his unfailing intuition. ‘Wonderful,’ she kept saying over and over again. ‘A man who can make the sun shine.’

After that, Emmi and Mutti always referred to a blue-sky day with bright sunshine as Führer weather. Eventually, everyone else did as well.

Oskar preferred not to think about Berlin and the sunshine that belonged to the Führer. Instead, he allowed himself to be distracted by a huddle of boys crouched at the edge of a pond that was busy with ducks. The thin sun caught the glint of metal in their hands as they cast off a row of empty sardine tins into the water. As the light breeze took them, the curled lids became sails and the tins scuttered along in among the ducks. He remembered summer afternoons at Teufelssee when he was nine or ten; he and Horst with their own little boats whittled from the bark of the sycamore tree. He was just thinking how lucky the boys were, and how little they realised it, when someone parked a black perambulator right in front of him,
obstructing his view. Inside, a large red baby was holding his breath with fury. As it let loose a blood-curding scream, a woman flopped down on the bench next to Oskar. She shook the handle of the pram but the baby yelled even louder.

‘You’re one of those lads from the Legation, aren’t you? Pleased to meet you,’ she stretched her hand out for him to shake it. ‘I’m Cissy.’ She reached into her pocket for a large pink dummy, and shoved it into the baby’s mouth. He began sucking on it, in an exploratory kind of way; when he decided it would do, he shut up.

‘You must have an awful time with that boss of yours. I hear he’s a right so-and-so. Mrs Lacey had himself and the wife to tea one day, and she said he hadn’t a word to fling at the cat.’

Oskar started to edge away from her but it didn’t seem to matter whether he answered her or not.

‘No offence, but Mrs Lacey says they’re an awful shower. Dull as ditchwater. Present company excluded, of course. Mrs Lacey says they’re even worse than the British, and God knows they’re bad enough. Still and all, she says, you have to keep inviting both sides. It’s like children, isn’t it? You’ve got to keep an eye on them for fear of what they’d get up to once your back’s turned.’

Oskar looked to see if she was being overheard but no one else seemed to have noticed him. The boys were still at their race, making waves in the pond with bits of stick, and a little cluster of older boys had begun to gather around them. The girl leaned over the pram to adjust the baby’s blanket, and Oskar took the opportunity to move away from her. He had almost got to the end of the pond, when she caught up with him. He felt a sweat begin to break on his forehead.

‘Between you and me, though, I’d rather the Germans than the other lot. They had their chance, God knows, and what they didn’t do to us isn’t worth talking about. A few Germans round the place might do us the power of good. You’d not
have a road the state of the one out there if the Germans were in charge.’

Oskar looked back to see a group of women gathering around the abandoned baby who had now begun to scream louder than ever. The sound of the crying stopped the nursemaid in her tracks. As she turned, Oskar began to walk briskly away, moving as fast as he could without breaking into a run. It wasn’t until he went to unfasten a side gate onto the street that he realised his hands were shaking. He was shocked that, tweed coat or not, he was so obviously a German.

The people who passed him on the streets were pasty-faced, their clothes poorly cut and colourless. The shops, too, were drab. A scattering of dead flies adorned a stack of faded biscuit tins in a café window. He stopped at a butcher’s, where strings of sausages lay coiled next to slabs of meat grained with yellow fat under a curtain of swaying carcasses. As a display of plenty, it was impressive. Each product was pierced by a triangle of white card bearing a price. He jingled the change around in his pocket but it was clear that it would barely buy a few sausages. He fingered grandpapa’s watch in his pocket and decided he’d pawn it if he had to.

He felt the whip of the wind as he crossed the river onto a wide boulevard dominated by a tall column with a statue on top. He’d never been to Paris but he’d seen photographs of the troops marching down the Champs-Élysées when the city fell. He didn’t think this street was very much like Paris, but maybe Miss Effie had been making a joke. Here, the people seemed poorer still. There were hollow-eyed men on every corner and women in plaid shawls begged with their babies. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shop window and couldn’t understand what had given him away. He loosened his collar, and shoved his hands in his coat pockets to look a little less military. There wasn’t much he could do about his hair, which was too short
and too blond. He made a mental note to look for a hat when he returned to Miss Effie’s. He spotted a pawnbroker’s sign in the distance. When he went to cross the road to reach it, a ragged woman pushing a battered pram swerved to avoid him. He glanced into the pram but there was nothing inside but a scattering of coal on a dirty pink blanket.

When Oskar reached the pawnbroker’s, the window was coverd by a blind the colour of tallow. Through the glass door, he could see that the hallway was empty but for a pile of old boxes and an unstrung harp. It seemed the pawnbroker had moved on. He was just wondering what to do about a map when his attention was caught by a streak of blue. The girl was dark, light-footed, and she was moving in the direction of the river. He thought he remembered that dress, blue as lake water. He hardly dared breathe for fear she might vanish before his eyes. He lost her a moment but then he spotted her again, rounding the side of a large building that was black with soot. Then, almost before he knew what had happened, she stepped onto a tram and was gone. It all happened so fast that he told himself it wasn’t Elsa. She could not have been and gone, just like that. He could not have been so close and then lose her. He had always had faith in happy endings but then so had Joachim, so certain that one day he would play that clarinet of his in Bourbon Street. Faith was no guarantee, but he was beginning to doubt, and he couldn’t afford that.

Another tram arrived and he found himself jumping aboard it. He crouched at the window, scanning the street for a girl in blue. He handed the conductor Desmond Hennessy’s coins one at at time until the man’s fist closed over them. All the while, he was scouring the street outside, trying to cover both sides at once. The other tram was just up ahead and he was sure he would have seen her get off. But they reached the end of the line and there was still no sign of her. Dejected, and with only the two silvery coins remaining, Oskar got off the
tram. That was when he saw the sea, unfolding grey in front of him. Gulls dipped and soared and wheeled across its surface. He filled his lungs with the smell of it and let the air wrap itself around his head. It was astonishing that this was all that divided him from the people he’d been bombing for months. He looked out to sea and tried to imagine what was on the other side of it. He’d heard that the English appreciated leisure above all else; that they would rather invent another ball game than fight another war. Vati used to say it was a pity it always seemed to be the English because they were just too damn easy to underestimate. They were that lazy idiot cousin who wasn’t much good for anything, yet somehow seemed to manage to beat you at tennis.

Oskar had flown over so many English cities, yet he had no idea what any of them were like. He wondered if the houses were like these ones, with semi-circles above the doorways to let in the light.
Speisekammer, Schmelztiegel, Loge
. He could only remember their code names. He had no recollection of their real names, if he’d ever been told them in the first place. For him, they’d been crude matrices, that’s all; docks, electricity installations, factories. He passed a neat network of streets radiating off behind a gasworks and it made him uneasy to think of houses like this lying snug against his targets. For the first time in days, he thought of the others, limping home without him. What did they say had happened? Had they even been punished for not having managed to stop him? And what about Mutti and Vati and Emmi? Were there repercussions for them? It was the first time it had occurred to him. The idea horrified him, and he didn’t let himself explore it any further.