Heritage (9 page)

He offered her his arm and wordlessly escorted her back into the pavilion. If only, he thought, she could be liberated from her views on herself.

I wonder why you keep me waiting, Charmaine, my Charmaine …

A singer who sounded remarkably like Perry Como had stepped up to the microphone – it was young Chris, a local boy who was very popular with the crowd.

I wonder when bluebirds are mating, will you come back again …

It was a slow waltz and, no longer concerned about appearances, Lucky held Peggy close. If the odd disapproving look from others didn't bother her, then it certainly didn't bother him.

I wonder if I keep on praying, will our dreams be the same …

Peggy felt him draw her closer than he usually did when they danced in public, and she was glad that he was throwing caution to the winds and no longer being overprotective. She didn't want Lucky to feel he was in any way responsible for her.

I wonder if you ever think of me too. I'm waiting, my Charmaine, for you.

Or did she? she wondered briefly as their bodies moved about the floor in perfect harmony with each other and the music. But just as briefly she dismissed the notion as fanciful romantic nonsense. She and Lucky were strictly ‘an affair' and she knew it.

It was one o'clock in the morning when they left the ball, Peggy swearing she couldn't dance another step, which was a lie – she could have, but she wanted to be alone with him. They talked non-stop during the ten-minute walk down Murray Street to the small weather-board house she rented just around the corner from the school. They agreed that the evening had been an unmitigated success and that they'd both enjoyed every minute of it.

‘And you certainly achieved your purpose,' Lucky said meaningfully.

‘Which was?' She stopped and looked at him.

‘What is that wonderful English saying? You have …' Lucky also halted while he searched for the phrase. ‘You have put a cat among the pigeons. Yes, that's it. That's just what you have done.'

‘And that was my purpose, was it?'

‘Yes, I believe so.'

She laughed. She wasn't really sure if that had been her conscious intention. ‘Well, if it was, and if I did, then I'm glad,' she said defiantly. They started walking again. ‘But I don't actually think I upset many, Lucky,' she added. ‘People are less narrow-minded than they used to be. The Snowy has taught them tolerance.'

Lucky didn't agree. ‘What about Cam Campbell?'

He'd chosen the perfect example and Peggy had no immediate answer. She'd always liked Cam, and she didn't want to admit that the force of his reaction had surprised and disappointed her.

‘Cam is a product of his times,' she said carefully. ‘He's an old-fashioned man, set in his ways, and we shocked him. I suppose I fitted his image of the perfect schoolteacher and …' She tailed off with a shrug and a laugh. ‘Let's face it, Lucky, I fit the schoolteacher image for most people, and so I should, I've worked all my life to do just that, so no wonder the poor man was shocked.'

Lucky didn't reply as they arrived at the house. In his mind, there was no legitimising Cam Campbell's behaviour: there had been too much hatred in it. And the legitimising of hatred was something Lucky had seen far too often in the past.

Later, however, when they'd made love and he lay on his side, one leg nestled between her thighs, raking his fingers through her hair splayed on the pillow, he decided that the man was not worth taking seriously.

‘I wonder what Cam Campbell would say about his perfect schoolteacher now?' he smiled.

‘I dread to think.' Peggy laughed, breathless, still recovering from the passion which continued to surprise her. ‘Let's not tell him.'

The discovery of Peggy's passion had surprised them both. The first time Lucky had kissed her, tenderly and with affection, he'd been making no conscious sexual advance, and he'd been taken aback by the hunger of her response. He'd also been aroused, and when they'd made love, he'd been further surprised, and further aroused, by the depth of her passion.

But Peggy's surprise had far outweighed his. Peggy Minchin's discovery of her sexuality had been a total awakening. Her one previous experiment with a man had been a disappointment and she had never explored her own body, never fantasised about its potential. The fact that it could be brought to rapturous orgasm with relative ease had never crossed her mind – such states of sexual euphoria belonged only in books. Now, three months later, the force of her passion remained a never-ending source of amazement and pleasure.

He kissed her softly, and lay back, cradling her in his arms. Soon he would drift off to sleep, and she would remain, head nestled against his shoulder, until she could hear the change in the rhythm of his breathing; then she would gently ease her body away from his. They would sleep for several hours, Lucky rising before daylight to return to the hostel, trying unsuccessfully not to wake her, and insisting that she remain in bed. ‘Sweet dreams, pretty Peggy,' he would whisper before he left.

She could hear the steadiness of his breathing now, and feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath her fingertips. Carefully, she slid to the other side of the bed. Her body was still unaccustomed to sleeping in close proximity with another.

Sated as she was, she always tried to stay awake, just for a little while. She liked to relive her rapture, to relish the fact that never in her life had she felt so alive, but sleep usually claimed her after only a few moments.

Tonight, however, was different. Tonight sleep eluded her, her brain refusing to wallow in rapturous recall and choosing instead to think of the evening's events.

Was Lucky right? she wondered. Had she been making a statement? Had she deliberately set out to ‘put a cat among the pigeons' as he'd said? And, if so, what had been her aim?

As the answer occurred to her, Peggy felt herself cringe with embarrassment. By so openly flaunting her relationship with Lucky, she was forcing not only the township to accept them as a couple, but also Lucky himself. Had it really been her intention, to seek a commitment from him? She hadn't been aware of it at the time, but if that had been her ulterior motive in inviting him to the ball, then it had been very wrong of her. She had thrown herself at him the first time they'd kissed, and not once had there been any talk of commitment. He had never told her he loved her, and she had never burdened him by professing her own love; it would not have been fair.

She lay in the dark chastising herself. She would apologise to him as soon as he awoke, she told herself. He had, after all, been scrupulously honest with her.

Peggy knew that much as Lucky had embraced his new life in the Snowies, he was not ready to embrace a new wife, and he probably never would be.

‘I am unable to let go of the past, Peggy,' he had said that very first night after they'd made love. And he'd told her about his wife. She had perished at Auschwitz, along with their daughter. He should have perished too, he'd said, except someone else went in his place.

‘My best friend,' he'd told her. Then he'd smiled humourlessly, and his voice had been tinged with self-loathing. ‘Lucky by name, lucky by nature, that's me. I am here because my best friend died in my place, and because a Nazi was a lousy shot.' And, as she had lain silently in his arms, he had told her his story.

‘Samuel. Samuel, can you hear me? You're alive, Samuel. You must wake up. Can you hear me, Samuel? You must wake up.'

Samuel Lachmann's eyelids flickered open as he felt himself gently rolled onto his back and his head was propped against someone's shoulder. He blinked several times, unable to see through his left eye, which was clouded by blood. He flinched and jerked his head away from the beam of light.

‘Slowly. No quick movements.'

He lay propped against the stranger for several seconds, trying to remember where he was and what had happened. His head and his left arm throbbed with pain. He realised he was in the apartment. He could see the legs of the dining table in the low beam of the torch. Puzzled, he squinted at the person who was whispering to him in the dark.

‘It's me,' the voice said, and the torchlight was directed upon a face he knew well, ‘it's me, Efraim.'

Efraim Meisell. What was Efraim Meisell doing in the apartment? Samuel was bewildered. The Meisells and the Lachmanns no longer visited each other, even though they lived just across the square. Young Naomi stole over for the occasional English lesson with Ruth, but the Meisells and the Lachmanns hadn't visited each other for a whole year – it was too risky.

‘We need to get you out of here. They come back to collect the bodies at first light.'

They! Samuel sat bolt upright. He knew who ‘they' were and, with sudden and horrifying clarity, he knew what had happened. He could see it. Ruth on the floor, the rifle aimed directly at her head. He staggered to his feet, clutching the dining table for support.

Efraim scrambled up beside him. ‘Slowly, you must move slowly or you'll faint; you've lost a lot of blood …'

‘Ruth. They shot Ruth!'

‘No, they didn't.' Efraim said it with force, but Samuel continued to look at him in wild disbelief. The memory was so clear. Ruth, the rifle, then the explosion. But he could not remember anything after that.

‘They didn't shoot her,' Efraim insisted. Samuel had the look of a madman. ‘Naomi saw them take her away.'

Swaying unsteadily on his feet, Samuel remembered throwing himself at the SS man with the rifle. That was when he'd heard the explosion.

‘Can you walk?' Efraim asked. ‘Lean on me,' and without waiting for an answer, he draped Samuel's right arm over his shoulder and clasped him tightly around the waist.

Samuel ignored the pain as they slowly made their way towards the door. ‘They took Rachel too?'

‘Yes.' Efraim was aware that the question was rhetorical, but he knew Samuel needed to ask it and, more importantly, that he needed to hear the answer out loud. ‘They took Rachel. And they took Mannie as well.'

Confusion mingled with Samuel's pain. His head seemed on fire. Mannie? Why would they take Mannie? He wasn't a Jew. He opened his mouth to enquire, but they were at the front door and Efraim hushed him as he switched off the torch. Then, silently, they edged out into the darkness of the hall.

Ten minutes later, ensconced in the cellar of the ground-floor flat opposite, Sharon Meisell bathed the caked blood from Samuel's face and, careful not to start up the bleeding, she applied disinfectant to the open wound where the bullet had splintered his cheekbone and raked an ugly furrow along the side of his head.

‘It will leave a nasty scar but it will mend,' she announced. ‘You are fortunate you did not lose an eye, Samuel.'

‘An eye?' Efraim said. ‘He is fortunate to be alive.'

Efraim and Sharon were accepting the inevitability of what had happened and concentrating on the present, but Samuel was not. Despite the pain which threatened to engulf him, he was barely aware of Sharon's ministrations as he listened to young Naomi Meisell.

When the Nazis had first appeared in the street outside, it had been apparent that the object of their raid was the apartment building opposite, and Naomi had ignored her parents' orders to go with them to their hiding place in the cellar. She had watched through the gauze curtains of the front room instead, and she told Samuel in precise detail everything she had witnessed. Eighteen-year-old Naomi prided herself on her precision and eye for detail and it had a purpose. When she escaped Germany, she had no intention of fleeing to safety with her parents; she would join the nearest resistance group she could find.

There had been five of them, she told Samuel, one man in plain clothes whom she judged to be Gestapo, and four uniformed SS. ‘One officer and three troopers,' she said. They had marched Ruth and Mannie out of the building, and little Rachel had been in Ruth's arms. The three of them had been unhurt, she hastily assured him. Mannie had been carrying a suitcase and he had had his arm around Ruth.

‘Mannie was protecting her, Samuel.'

As Sharon started cutting away his shirt in order to examine the flesh wound in his upper arm where the other bullet had passed through, Samuel continued to fight against the pain, seizing instead upon the shred of hope Naomi had fed him.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘That's why Mannie went with them. Mannie will save her.' Noticing the look that passed between Efraim and his wife, he realised how unrealistic he must sound to them. But they didn't understand. ‘Mannie is a lawyer,' he said, ‘a distinguished lawyer from a respected Aryan family.'

As the idea formulated in Samuel's brain, he started to feel light-headed, possibly from his wounds, or from loss of blood, or perhaps … just perhaps … from the dizzying possibility that there might actually be hope. He felt driven to convince them of his argument.

‘When Manfred Brandauer pleads on Ruth's behalf,' he insisted, ‘they will listen!'

The only sound in the room was the slop of the water in the bowl as Sharon started to bathe Samuel's arm.

They didn't believe him, he thought, and who could blame them? He knew what they were thinking. Plead for what? There were no grounds to plead on a Jew's behalf.

‘Ruth's mother was a Gentile.' He tried to sound as if he was pulling an ace from his sleeve, but he knew that his voice lacked the ring of triumph. ‘And she looks Aryan …' he could hear himself sounding more desperate by the second ‘… that will help when Mannie makes his plea.'

Sharon stopped bathing the wound and glanced at her husband, who nodded. Efraim, too, knew it had gone far enough. Both of them turned to their daughter.

‘Mannie was wearing your coat, Samuel,' Naomi said. ‘He was wearing your coat with the Star of David on it.'

Samuel's hopes died in that instant. He'd known they'd been implausible, born of wishful desperation, but they'd been something to cling to. Now, with the enormity of his friend's sacrifice, came the recognition of the inevitability of his wife's death, and all hope deserted him. Like the hundreds of thousands before him and the hundreds of thousands yet to follow, Samuel Lachmann felt himself drowning in despair.

 

He didn't leave Berlin with the Meisells, although Efraim secured him false papers. His head wound made him conspicuous, he said, and he insisted he would pose too great a threat to their safety as a travelling companion. The family had already risked far too much on his behalf, he told Efraim. In saving his life they had risked their own and he was forever in their debt.

‘You were not intended for death, Samuel,' Efraim said, embracing him in farewell. ‘It was God's will you should live. You are a lucky man.'

Lucky? Lucky to have lost his wife and daughter? Lucky to live the rest of his life in the knowledge that the man who had been a brother to him had died in his place? Samuel could taste the bitterness like bile on his tongue as he returned Efraim's embrace. He wished Efraim hadn't saved him; he wished that he'd died that night. But he allowed Efraim to believe he still cared about life, it was only fair. He would live secretly in the cellar, he said, and when his wounds had healed he would make good his escape. Then he bade the family farewell.

Samuel did not live in secret. He flaunted his existence, venturing out daily, and his enquiries about the departures from Grunewald Goods Train Station were dangerously blatant. A chain of information existed for Jews seeking loved ones, witnesses surreptitiously passing along the grapevine the names of those they had seen rounded up for transportation. It was advisable to be discreet, however: word could reach the Nazis who were always keen to identify anyone asking questions. Samuel's lack of discretion yielded swift results and, after several days of persistent investigation, he discovered the information he sought.

Early in the morning after their capture, Ruth and Rachel and Mannie had been seen herded into the cattle trucks along with the hundreds of others who had huddled on the railway platform throughout the night, their destination Auschwitz.

Samuel decided to leave Germany.

The night before his departure, he visited the second-floor apartment across the square, his purpose not one of sentiment but practicality. He needed supplies, most importantly whatever cash he could lay his hands on, and he hoped that the meagre savings Ruth had put aside were still in the tea canister where she kept them.

The door was not locked, but then why should it be? Only he and Ruth had keys to the apartment. He turned on the overhead light, heedless that such advertisement of his presence might be imprudent. Everything remained exactly as it had been, with one exception. There was a large, dark stain on the floorboards beside the dining table. But that was all it was, just a stain. Where was the blood? Who had cleaned it up?

Frau Albrecht, Samuel thought, recalling how, several days previously, as he'd been leaving the Meisells' flat, he'd looked up at the second-floor apartment opposite to see a figure watching him from behind the living room curtains. He'd known immediately, by the glint of sunlight on silver hair, that it was Frau Albrecht. He'd been surprised. He'd never thought of the Albrechts as pilferers, but why else would Frau Albrecht be in his apartment? War obviously made thieves of even the most respectable, he'd decided, and he hoped she hadn't discovered the money in the tea canister.

Now, as he looked at the stained floorboards, he pictured Frau Albrecht on her hands and knees, scrubbing away with furious intent. Of course she'd have cleaned up the mess, he thought scornfully, she wouldn't have been able to help herself. Frau Albrecht was fastidious, and pools of congealed blood were not only untidy, they were unhygienic.

Samuel had always felt disdain for the conservative, elderly couple who'd owned the other apartment on the second floor for twenty years. The Albrechts' front door was virtually opposite the Lachmanns', but so assiduously did they avoid Samuel and Ruth that meetings in the hall were rare, and on the odd occasions when they misjudged their timing, they would nod politely to Ruth and pointedly ignore Samuel.

‘Of course they ignore us, Samuel – they have to.' Ruth's defence of the couple had been vociferous from the outset. ‘I think they're very brave,' she'd added with that edge to her voice that defied disagreement. The Albrechts had been friends of her father's, she'd explained, and when it had become dangerous to be friends with a Jew, they had distanced themselves. As mere neighbours it would be easier for them to plead ignorance should it prove necessary.

‘And ignorance is bravery?' Samuel's reply had been scathing, but Ruth's retort had been equally so.

‘Yes, Samuel,' she'd said. ‘In failing to report us they could be accused of harbouring Jews and sent to their deaths, so yes, their ignorance is most brave.'

Samuel had shrugged his acknowledgement, but she hadn't convinced him. Like his best friend, Mannie, Samuel believed people should stand up and be counted. ‘Too many are pleading ignorance,' both men agreed.

Now, as he pictured Frau Albrecht scrubbing the blood from the floorboards, Samuel wondered whether playing ignorant had proved too much for the Albrechts. Had it been the Albrechts who had denounced them? he wondered. But as quickly as the thought occurred he put it aside. He would go mad if he tried to allot blame; he and Ruth had been living on borrowed time for so long they had brought about their own undoing.

The money was in the canister. Along with the handful of coins was the neatly folded ten-reichsmark note he'd earned that last day working at Hoffmann's Garage. The note had been crumpled and covered in grease when he'd handed it to Ruth, he recalled, and he could hear her good-natured chastisement as she carefully wiped it with a warm dishcloth and folded it into a square. ‘Really, Samuel, you are the messiest man I know.' She hadn't been able to clean the grease off completely, he noticed, the money was still slightly stained.

Mannie's knapsack remained on the kitchen bench where he'd left it and Samuel took it into the bedroom. He packed some items of clothing, a torch and his penknife, and then, from the top drawer of the dresser, he lifted out a photograph of Ruth. He would have liked to have had one of Rachel too, but there were no photographs of the child. The past two years had not been a time for taking photographs. What was the point? To have them developed would have been far too risky.

The picture of Ruth that he kept in the top drawer was Samuel's favourite. It was the one Mannie had taken on campus, outside the library. Mannie had been characteristically methodical, searching for the perfect light, the perfect angle, the perfect composition, and Ruth had made fun of him, posing and pulling silly faces, until finally she'd burst into exasperated laughter. ‘Oh for God's sake, Mannie, press the button!' Mannie had, and he'd captured the very essence of Ruth, which, as Samuel knew, had been his intention all along.

Samuel slid the photograph into his pocket. The picture was as representative of Mannie as it was of Ruth, for Mannie's love was in it. Mannie had loved Ruth, Samuel had always known it. He'd even told Ruth. ‘You do realise that Mannie's in love with you, don't you?' But she laughed, not taking him seriously, and he never mentioned it again. It wasn't fair to Mannie, he thought.