A Parachute in the Lime Tree (8 page)

He was matter-of-fact when it came to undressing her. He stood at arm’s length, like a doctor. He took care to undo each button, to avoid ripping anything. At school, she had always hidden from others the birthmark that stained her left breast like a swirl of purple ink, avoided swimming with anyone but Oskar, worn blouses that reached the neck. He could look at that, if it made him merciful. All the same, she couldn’t stop her shoulders from curling inward, her knees from clamping together. She tried so hard not to shake, not to be sick, not to show anything of what she felt.

She concentrated on a vase of delphiniums on the table behind him; tucked herself inside the bell of one of the flowers. She managed to stay there a moment but the air from the open window was like another assault and she was too afraid not to watch him, to be prepared. And so she watched. The Professor’s mouth was gaping, his eyes slurred, his hand working furiously at his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice her move a step or two back from him, and she realised that she had seen that look before. A painting, she thought, one of their saints, someone who believed he’d seen God. He didn’t try to touch her. It was as though her shame was enough for him. Sensing he was finished, she dived to find her clothes.

‘Not yet.’ Seated at his desk, he became the Professor again, his eyes clearer now, his pencil whispering on the paper on front of him. ‘Look up.’

Whilst she did raise her head a little, she looked at a sunset, not at him. Then she found the delphinium again as he took what he wanted from her and put it down on the paper.

When he had finished, he got up from the desk and, with his foot, edged the neat pile of clothes in her direction. ‘Out.’

She shoved on enough bits and pieces to be decent and bundled the rest into the pockets of her coat. She was almost at the door when he threw her the key.

Somehow she made it home, skirting the walls of the buildings, avoiding the strangers with beer already on their breath. She was desperate for Oskar but they always seemed to think up new ways of keeping him away. She conjured him up and had him kiss her eyes, her neck, the curve of her stomach, but it only made the longing worse. Oskar had always been there. As kids they’d ignored one another; Emmi was the one who used to slip through the connecting gate to share secrets and bonbons. Then, when the hate began to spread and the connecting gate was bricked up, they fell defiantly in love. He couldn’t stand the Hitler Jugend; he said it was all bullshit but that he’d do it if it meant they’d leave him alone. He was always so certain it would all blow over. Oskar: so blue-eyed and sure of himself and unafraid of everything. So different from her and careful with her and eager for her. Forever telling her she was the only thing that made it possible for him to live in this shithole of a city. If only she had Oskar, she could bear the rest of it.

In her room, she took out Herr Goldmann’s spools, rolling them around on her table until their colours became more real than the memory of the Professor. All afternoon she worked, stabbing fiercely at her clothing with a fine needle; reclaiming it, filling up the moth holes on her grey coat with little scribbles of orange, purple, pink. In the distance, they were playing their music now; strutting too, no doubt, for the little leader.
She thought of the Professor and hoped that what he had taken would be enough. Papa was late that night. Mama busied herself straightening the pictures in the drawing room, wiping away the dust that Beate no longer chose to notice.

Next door, at the Müller house, guests had arrived. Arranged in the garden like new-grown shrubs, they clinked and drank and trilled happily. Of Oskar, there was no sign. It was when the garden was empty again, long after the last of the Party faithful had trailed past the house, some singing, others still bearing their torches, that Elsa heard Papa fumbling at the lock. Once inside, he slumped back against the door, his eyes closed, a package under his arm.

Mama tripped along the corridor like a little duck, her fists out from her sides. She knocked over a photograph from the hall table in her rush to get to him. Soon she had her hands on his waist and was guiding him into the drawing room from behind. He slumped into a chair. Beate appeared at the kitchen door, eyes cast up to her heaven, a shrug on her shoulders. Mama was kneeling at his feet, gently clapping his cheek with one hand as she held him steady with the other. ‘What have they done to you? Elsa, a cup of water. Hurry now.’

Elsa held the glass out at arm’s length to stop her hand from shaking. He didn’t take it, so she laid it on the table beside him. He held his head in his hands so all that could be seen of him was the fragile pink shell of his skull. He placed his hand over Mama’s. ‘I need to talk to Elsa,’ he said.

Mama looked hurt and Elsa could tell she was angry with her already. Even so, she shut the door behind her in her precise, quiet way.

‘You know we can’t afford to stand out.’ He shook his head slowly, laid the package on the table, then nudged it towards her.

The first thing she noticed was the colours. Forbidden colours: a skirl of harsh pink, a scream of green. Even on first sight, Elsa could see that the girl’s face was a version of her own.
Older than she remembered it, thinner, with wary eyes. As she tried to make sense of the thick black lines of the girl’s body, she heard Papa gulp back his glass of water like a man returned from the desert. This Elsa was naked, her sharp knees set apart and between them something raw, red, secret. Across her concave chest a long purple gash seemed to open up her left breast.

She felt serene, because that wounded ghost of a thing wasn’t her. It wasn’t Elsa. She tried to tell Papa that the Professor had wanted to crush her but that he hadn’t dared. That this was the nearest he could get. That when the time came, none of them would dare. She opened her mouth to start explaining it all to him but he just shook his head. ‘No words, Elsa. They don’t matter now.’

When he had swallowed the last of the water he looked at her. ‘“After all, Frankel,” he said to me, “it is your kind of thing.”’

He sniffed, then wiped his nose with his sleeve. She was ashamed to notice that his fingernails were bitten, his cuff frayed. Her thoughts were like butterflies now, unaccustomed to the freedom she allowed them to find a way to sweep away Papa’s hurt.

‘“Surely you haven’t forgotten,” he said, “the merest whiff of turpentine and they’ll cart you off. Whatever you people do amongst yourselves, you live in our world now.”
You people
. That’s how he spoke to me, the Professor.’ His voice quavered. ‘“You say it’s not yours, Frankel, that of course you no longer paint, that if you did paint it would be anything but this. But it is your kind of art,” he said. “Between the two of us, it is your kind of thing. And it is undoubtedly your daughter, is it not?”’

Papa was rubbing his clenched fist along his leg and then he began to sob. ‘“Frankel,” he said, “teach your daughter to keep her clothes on and her legs closed. You people must live by our rules.”’

For an instant, she wondered which was worse for him, his own shame or hers. She bowed her head and felt for the spools that weren’t there.

He began to settle himself, with a deep breath he held for an eternity then released in one harsh sigh. He drew himself up higher in his chair, business-like now, more of the old Papa about him. ‘All the same, it was kind of the Professor to retrieve it for us, save our blushes. He’s a good man, after all. A man who still shows some respect.’ He took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and laid it over the surface of the painting like a cover on a dead man’s face. ‘Get some sleep now.’

She took that as a dismissal and so she left the room, leaving a small kiss on his forehead. She stayed just outside the door, though, watching him, as though she had become the parent and he the child. For want of spools, she ran through in her head the pictures in her music book: Schubert – or was it Liszt – bleeding onto the piano keys; Beethoven with his ear clamped to the floor. Papa propped the painting up on his easel. He surveyed it as if it was something he himself had just completed. Then, he moved out of view. Craning her neck, she could see that he was on his hands and knees in front of one of the cupboards, a tower of papers on either side of him.

She watched him take out some battered biscuit tins. Then, a clatter of brushes on the desk. Colours in tubes and pots. He rolled the pile of brushes back and forth on his desk with the palm of his hand until he found the one he wanted. Thumbed the bristles then laid the chosen one down in front of him like a dessert spoon. He opened a tube of paint and smeared a little on the back of his hand. Another, then another, until at last he had it as he wanted it.

He poised his brush over the canvas and made a series of vertical lines in the air, flicking the tip back as though trying to remember how it was done. Soon, he was smoothing a layer of red onto the girl’s naked body. He painted out the birthmark first. When Elsa was younger, Mama used to tell her God had marked her out as special. Papa’s brush was more honest. Next her concave chest went, with its small walnut nipples, the thin
shoulders and the lower body all disappeared under a layer of red paint. She stayed until it was over and even though he must have known she was watching him, he said nothing. By the time he had finished, a new red dress glowed on the easel.

Papa didn’t get up the next morning. Mama made him a tisane and Elsa saw in her eyes that she blamed her. When he did get out of bed a week or so later, he insisted on putting the altered picture on the wall, in that most honoured position over the fruit bowl that he and Mama had bought in Venice on their honeymoon.

‘How kind of the Professor to give us all such a charming gift. A most thoughtful farewell.’

Elsa could detect no irony. Mama looked at him with a kind of desperate love.

He threw himself into an orgy of letter writing. In address books, diaries, he underlined everyone who might be of use. Former colleagues, people who got out in the years he’d spent clinging on to the clerk’s job, academics who once cited his papers and now didn’t even reply to his letters. People in France, England, America. There was something about Madagascar. Just as suddenly, his furious optimism seemed to fizzle out and he went back to bed.

Then came the night Mama had predicted and Papa said would never happen: the synagogue in flames, a fury on those with the wrong names. The glass was shattered and once that went, almost everyone was within their reach: Herr Goldmann for one; the old man gone, his door in splinters, the shop a tangle of coloured yarns like a shredded tapestry.

A whole day passed and still the Frankels remained untouched. Elsa put it down to the painting. She decided that it had absorbed all their hatred. The harm they might do was trapped there in the slashes and stabs of paint that made up the girl’s face. For the first time, she understood their fervour for magic images, now that she had one of her own.

All night long, men and boys paraded up and down Zweibrückenstrasse and there was always the chance that the painting would fail them. Elsa watched from the attic window. She knew now that blood or no blood, somewhere Oskar was amongst them.

Next day, Beate walked out the door, her bag rattling with Frankel silver. The girl in the red dress disappeared too. Overnight, she was overcome by thick crimson daubs, all trace of her obliterated. Papa sat back in his chair to observe his work. Elsa went to the piano. She played Scarlatti with the shutters closed.

At dinner, Papa took out his medal and propped it up on the table in front of him, leaning it against the pepper pot. Iron Cross, First Class. Won for gallantry in the war against France and England. He peered at the medal as he ate, barely pausing to draw breath between one mouthful and the next. When he had finished, he picked it up and tossed it up and down in his palm. Later that night, Papa was in the garden. When everyone had gone to bed she heard him digging, and the medal was never seen again.

Not long after the loss of Papa’s job came the news that the money in his
Sperrkonto
had been confiscated. Even though Mama begged him not to, he wrote a letter of protest to the Gestapo, headed it ‘Polite Request’. There was no reply. Money began to run short, then very short. He was desperate to see what the post brought each day and took to standing outside embassies in the hope that someone from somewhere would give them a visa. Eventually, it was Mama who made the decision to leave. ‘It’s not that we have anything left here. If we go to Hanne and Rudi in Amsterdam, at least we’re with family. We can look out for one other.’

By the time Holland became a real possibility, it seemed almost local after Argentina, America and all those other places Papa had talked of. The relations there were Mama’s. For all
that, Elsa worried more about Mama than Papa when it came to living in Holland. Mama had always said there didn’t seem to be a lot of point to Holland. In fact, none at all that she could think of other than tulips and she could manage to grow those well enough herself, thank you very much.

After Beate left, there was a change in Mama. Her convictions about even the most minor things had become stronger but they were always short-lived. She moved the furniture around incessantly and changed the curtains from winter to summer and back again every other week. She engaged in frenzied activity about the house; dusting, sweeping, emptying cupboards. She bristled when Elsa suggested they visit the shop for some food for the long journey to Holland.

‘Shop? What shop? Hirsch, with his face crushed like a tomato? Or Goldmann? No more Hirsch. No more Gold-mann, either, to let us live on credit.’

On the last morning in Zweibrückenstrasse, Mama and Elsa walked through the house to see if there were any last items they might try to fit in. Mama took a silver locket with a hollow centre from a drawer in the writing desk. She turned it over and over in her palm. ‘If you put something you treasure in it, you’ll keep it safe.’ She smiled a little uncertainly as she handed it to Elsa.

Elsa went to her bedroom, to the old cigar humidor in which she’d kept her treasures ever since childhood. Most were things she didn’t value any more and she could hardly remember why she’d ever kept them: Salzburg sweet wrappers, a wooden peg doll, an autograph book with the names of people long forgotten. From a small fold of tissue paper, she took the lock of Oskar’s hair, fairer then than now, and placed a strand inside the locket.