All My Sins Remembered (80 page)

‘Nathaniel is out,’ he told them. ‘Just walking.’

Nathaniel had taken to pacing the suburban streets in the shelter of darkness, going nowhere in particular, trying only to work off the frustration of the anxious days.

‘Is there any news?’ Grace asked.

Rafael shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

He had been thinking of Clio. Something in Grace’s look tonight made Clio seem closer, as if she were here in Berlin instead of far off in Paris. He thought suddenly of the little inn in the Thüringer Wald, and the long country nights, and the feather mattress that had enveloped them.

Romy had been conceived at the inn, Clio always said that.

Rafael’s face suddenly softened, and he was able to look up at Julius and Grace. There was some joy in Berlin, then, even if it was at odds with everything else that was happening and all the fear that was concentrated inside him.

He stood up and lightly touched Julius’s shoulder.

‘There is some food,’ he said. ‘I went shopping. Shall I lay it out?’

Julius smiled. The taut lines had faded from his face, and the hollows seemed to have filled out. He looked almost like a young boy.

‘That would be good,’ he said simply.

They sat down and ate and talked together. Rafael warmed to Grace a little, because he saw the way that Julius looked at her, and her gentleness to him in return.

When Nathaniel came in he was tired, and could eat nothing. He drank some of the beer that Rafael had bought, and then went off alone to his
pension
.

Grace knew that she should go back to London. The House was sitting again, and all the speculation was as to whether the King would insist on a morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson, or whether he would be forced to abdicate. From the Woodstock Road, she had heard that Cressida was well enough but unusually quiet. According to Eleanor’s diagnosis she was probably missing her mother.

Just one or two more days, Grace kept resolving. She could do nothing for Alice. She would allow herself just a few more hours of this strange, sweet and passionate limbo that Julius had induced, and then she must go home and back to the real world. Neither of them had discussed what must happen when that time came. Julius held on to her, living each moment like a drowning man, and Grace fell under the spell of his intensity.

They moved slowly, as if they were bewitched, from the hotel bedroom to Julius’s apartment, out into the cold streets and back into the draughty rooms, entirely lost in one another. Rafael and even Nathaniel were like strangers, on the far periphery of their private world. They talked, almost always about the past, their childhoods and Stretton and Oxford, and the years in between that had brought them here, and they made love, endlessly, with the sharp appetites of the needy.

On December 11 the King abdicated. The four of them heard the news from England on the wireless in Julius’s apartment, delivered in solemn, portentous tones by the German news broadcaster.

‘Poor devil,’ Julius said and Grace looked at him, her eyes suddenly bright with tears.

‘It is a very great deal to give up, just for a woman,’ she whispered.

‘I would do the same,’ Julius said.

Nathaniel sat in his corner with his head buried in his hands.

The next day a messenger came to Wilmersdorf from the British Embassy. Nathaniel was required to see the Ambassador at once. He went in a great hurry, pulling on his raincoat and flattening his ancient hat on his head as he emerged into the icy street. Julius went with him, and Grace and Rafael waited at the apartment.

The room they were shown into at the Embassy was small and bare, furnished only with a desk and chairs and a portrait of the King. Julius looked up at it while they waited, wondering if his face would be turned to the wall, or how soon it could be taken down and the new King’s image hurried into its place.

Then the Ambassador and one of the Secretaries came into the room and as soon as he saw them Julius froze with his idle reflections heavy as a stone in his heart. Nathaniel half rose from his place. His bulk seemed awkward and heavy in the confined space, and his knuckles whitened as he struggled to balance by the polished arms of the chair.

‘I am afraid I have some very bad news.’

The slow, grave words filled the space around them.

There was no air, no light anywhere.

Nathaniel threw his head back, and Julius thought his father was going to howl aloud like a child. He moved quickly, putting his arm under Nathaniel’s, having to support what had always seemed a source of power and strength.

Alice was dead.

She had been shot while trying to escape from the Sachsenhausen camp.

The younger diplomat was looking at a single half-sheet of paper held in his hand. ‘That is all the information we have at the moment. We are doing everything we can to discover how and why this happened. The authorities are being cooperative.’

They could not take in what he was saying. Nathaniel had fallen back into the chair. His mouth hung open and he sucked in one painful breath. Julius knelt beside him and fumbled to loosen his collar stud, and behind him he heard the door opening and the sound of whispered instructions and hurrying feet. A woman with a pearl necklace leant over his shoulder and held out a glass of brandy. Julius took it and held it up to Nathaniel’s mouth.

At last Nathaniel shuddered and leant forward. He rested one elbow on his knee and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Julius had seen him adopt this pose a thousand times before, discussing some fine point of philology with his graduate students or arbitrating in a family disagreement. It brought back the bookish clutter and the academic preoccupation of the Woodstock Road, sharp as this moment, as the last of his fragile hopes disintegrated. There was no mistake, and no hope. Alice was gone.

He thought of her body, huddled on the ground, and the terrible notion of the bullet hole came unbidden with it. Alice had been a little girl with wiry dark ringlets, running up and down the uneven stairs in the old house. Always behind the rest of them, hurrying to catch up.

Nathaniel seemed to regain some control of himself. Without looking up he said in a dry voice, ‘She would not have been trying to escape. She would have known that she would be released soon. That we were all here, working for it.’

But she had not been released. They had scratched away at the hard glitter of Nazi Berlin, in all their narrow futility, and they had achieved nothing. Julius thought of the hours they had spent in Grace’s little hotel, and the yellow walls that had seemed to make a place of safety.

The Ambassador said, ‘Our information is that she broke away from her group and ran to the perimeter wire, and kept on running when challenged by the guards. She was warned, but she made no response. A guard fired one shot.’

And that was all. There were disappearances every day. Alice was one out of uncounted hundreds or thousands. She was a British citizen and so there would be questions and official explanations. But it was just one more death, Berlin turning inwards, consuming its own flesh. This was not the Germany that Julius had come to years ago, to play the violin and to hear other men’s music. He tasted the thickness of disgust on his tongue, disgust with himself for living here for so long, as well as for the regime that had murdered his sister.

The Hirshes could see the diplomats’ sympathy and distress, but they could read other truths in the well-bred faces too. There were English girls who came out here and got involved. They made trouble, had affairs with SS men, needed to be baled out and shipped home. And this was the worst sort of business, the kind they all dreaded. The girl was clearly wide of the mark, and now she was dead. Probably no one would ever know quite how or exactly why. The police and the SS would see to that. It was an incident, a diplomatic embarrassment. It was to be contained, but with the proper degree of dignity and regret. That was what they were thinking.

Julius put his hand over Nathaniel’s. The older man’s felt cold and boneless. He was still sitting with his head bent, as if he were thinking out some problem in his study at home.

‘What will happen now?’ Julius asked the blond Englishmen.

After a moment, the younger one said, ‘We hope that her body will be released to you, for burial here or return to England.’

‘Thank you,’ Julius said.

And so Alice would not be huddled into the ground with the other missing, the husbands and fathers and children consumed by Hitler’s people. Hitler’s people, whom Alice had admired so passionately.

Julius knew that he would cry; he could feel the pain of the unshed tears. But not here, under the Embassy’s picture of the displaced King. He must get himself and Nathaniel away from here.

He found a way to stand up, and helped Nathaniel to his feet. They shook hands, listening to the murmurs of sympathy again, and the woman with the pearl necklace opened the door to let them out. They emerged into Wilhelmstrasse. There were cars and buses flooding past them, and people stepping busily and hopefully, and high, shining windows in tiers above their heads.

Nathaniel’s head shook, wobbling from side to side like an old man’s. Julius guided him to the kerb and helped him into a taxi. As they drove past the fashionable cafés and shops and the balconies draped with swastika flags, Julius could only think of Alice lying huddled where she had fallen, and of how she would never see this again, neither these streets nor home, where she belonged.

At Wilmersdorf Rafael and Grace knew at once that the worst had happened. Julius moved to put his arms around Grace’s shoulders and laid his cheek against her hair.

‘I am sorry,’ was all he could say, as if Alice’s death were his to apologize for. Grace stood stiffly in his embrace, and her eyes were wide and dry.

‘We must tell Eleanor. We must tell her mother,’ Nathaniel whispered.

It was two days before they were notified that Alice’s body had been released. When the message did come, they were taken in a car sent from the Embassy to an anonymous building in the Wedding district of North Berlin. There were two young policemen at the door. They had heavy, uneasy faces and they stared straight ahead of them as the small group filed past.

Alice’s body lay in a plain coffin resting on trestles in a room that looked as if it might once have been a classroom. There were nibbled dents in the dirty walls where maps or posters had been pinned, and the floor was pocked with the marks of desk- and chairlegs. The coffin had been left open, and the lid lay on the floor next to it.

Julius went slowly forward with his arm around his father’s shoulders. Grace and Rafael and the doctor that Rafael had brought to examine the body waited beside the door.

In her coffin Alice did not look very much different from the girl who had left London to go to stay with Clio in Paris. Her face was sharpened and there were hollows under her prominent cheekbones that were like thumbprints in softened wax. But her expression was utterly blank, and as calm as if her eyelids might suddenly spring open and stare unfocused, just for an instant, before life and recollection flooded back into them. Sometimes, Julius remembered, the living face had had that same eerily vacant stare. He would not have remarked on it, in trying to describe Alice to someone who had never known her, but the memory of it struck him now as he looked down into her coffin.

Her hair was loose. It sprang in a wiry mass to cover her forehead and her ears and waved in thick curls around her cheeks.

Nathaniel leant forward and touched one of her hands. He made a single sound, like a sob that never emerged from his throat. And then he turned and stumbled away. Beside the door Grace put her hand on his arm. Julius remembered her red nails, and the way that the dark-tipped fur of her shako hat seemed to melt into her dark hair.

Julius nodded to the doctor and Rafael. The doctor was a Jew, a middle-aged man with a pale, prematurely lined face. He tiptoed forward and put the tips of his fingers to Alice’s chin. He gently turned her head, first to one side and then the other. The hair fell away from the left temple to reveal the bullet hole. There were dark burn-marks in the skin around the black puncture. Julius made himself stand motionless, looking down at where the bullet had entered his sister’s brain.

Rafael muttered some words of German and went back to the doorway, to Nathaniel and Grace.

The doctor’s fingers moved over Alice’s skull. He frowned, as if he were listening to some barely audible instructions. Then he sighed, and his hands dropped to his sides.

Julius lingered for a moment longer. He could think of no blessing or even the gist of a prayer to whisper to Alice. He stooped down instead and picked up the coffin lid. He covered her with it and left her to the darkness.

Outside, when they were away from the young policemen, the doctor told them, ‘I cannot tell. I can only say that there is a single bullet wound, undoubtedly the cause of death. There are no obvious signs of violence; I think that she may not have been well fed in the days or weeks before her death, but she was not starving.’ He spread his hands, palms up, showing them his poverty. ‘I don’t know if she was trying to run away or standing still when she died. I am not a forensic specialist.’

They did not know and they would never know, Julius was afraid of that.

Rafael said, ‘I understand.’

The doctor added, ‘You are more fortunate than many. You have her to take back home; you know something, even if it is not enough.’ And he glanced at them, a sidelong speculative glance that could be quickly deflected, in the way that people in Berlin looked at each other now. ‘You must have friends somewhere.’

Grace stared straight ahead, her dry eyes dark and steady under the cloud of fur. None of the others moved or spoke.

‘Is there anything else I may help you with?’ the doctor asked. His manner was dignified and professional now; they had a sudden sense of the respected family physician that he must have been before he was denied the right to practise.

‘Thank you,’ Rafael murmured. He paid over some marks and the doctor took them, gratefully, but without looking directly at any of them. He melted away, and the Embassy car slid forward to take them back to Wilmersdorf.