Necessary Lies (34 page)

“Doesn't matter. Please. I'm Monika Schneider.
Mutti
has been waiting for you all afternoon.”

This is an old Berlin apartment house, with high ceilings, stuccoes, and stoves that are no longer in use but that have never been removed. There is no shortage of space in these rooms. The furniture is old and respectable, a heavy credenza with carved fruit and flowers on the crest, a set of chairs with soft brown cushions, a big leather armchair with head-rests. The dark mahogany table is covered by a lace tablecloth the colour of ivory.

Frau Strauss's apartment is filled with knickknacks. A pair of milky glass doves kisses on the shelf, a marionette — Pierrot holding a birthday cake with five candles on it — hangs in the entrance to the kitchen. Strings of tiny brass bells decorate the walls. Photographs are everywhere, on the walls, on the bookshelves, on the little rosewood table by the window. In one of them, a woman in a white dress is just about to bury her face in a bouquet of white lilies, in another a young man is squatting next to a small aeroplane. There is a set of playing cards pushed aside to the left of the rosewood table. Frau Strauss must have been playing solitaire.

Anna unfolds her gift, a bouquet of pale yellow roses, tied with a green bow, wrapped in cellophane.

“They are lovely, thank you,” says Monika, who spoke so warmly to her on the phone, and puts the flowers in the middle of the table next to the old photographs of William and Käthe. “But you shouldn't have bothered.”

Frau Strauss is in her late seventies, and she apologizes that her English is not too good. Her daughter, she says, will help to translate if she is short of words. It was lucky that Moni was visiting her right when Anna called, for she lives a few streets away from here.

“Sit down,” Frau Strauss says. “Please.” A welcoming smile on her broad, wrinkled face.

There is something twinlike about the mother and daughter that goes beyond their kinship, a sense of lightness
and the grace of a ballerina. The mother's hair is braided and twined around the back of her head and she moves fast, with surprising agility for her age. Both women wear dresses, not identical, but differing not so much in design as in the colours of the fabric. The mother's dress is dark grey, and has a lace collar around the neck, the daughter prefers light blue.

Anna sits down, carefully, and watches the steam rise from the cups, a tiny whirlpool of warm air, the thin slices of
Apflestrudel
arranged on a Meissen plate, the cotton napkins, pale beige, embroidered in one corner, ironed and impeccably folded. Monika is holding out the plate, waiting for Anna to pick a warm slice of cake. The smell of cinnamon reaches Anna's nostrils, the smell of the apple pie William warmed the day he died.

She must look pale, for both Monika and Frau Strauss are asking her if she is all right. They offer to open the window, and Anna nods, taking a deep breath that brings some colour back to her cheeks.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “It must be the travelling. So much is happening. I don't get much sleep.” She takes a few sips of tea and a bite of cake.

The photographs on the table are small, with fancy jagged edges. “This here is Käthe. And this, this is Willi.” Frau Strauss says. At seven William has short hair and a shy smile. He is wearing knee-high shorts and a knitted vest. In another picture Käthe and Frau Strauss, in berets, their trench coats tightly wrapped around their waists, are standing together, arms linked. Two young, smiling faces.

“You can have these,” Monika says. “Please take them. For Käthe. We have doubles.”

“Käthe will be very happy,” Anna says,
“Danke. Danke schön”

“How is she?” Frau Strauss asks. A gift for Käthe is waiting on the armchair. It is carefully wrapped up in red paper and tied with a golden ribbon.

“Frail,” Anna says. “But she'll be all right. She doesn't give up.”

Frau Strauss nods slowly, with approval, as if she expected nothing less from her friend.

“It's terrible about Willi” she says. “I still can't believe it. He always had so much life in him. He was still so young!” Frau Strauss says, wiping tears off her cheeks. “The last time he was here, he showed us a musical box he had just bought. A really old Austrian one, with bells. My father had a similar one in Breslau. But Willi! It was as if he were a little child again. He wound it up and we all listened.
Lorelei waltz.”

In one of the photographs on the table William is surrounded by children, two girls and a boy, showing them something, for they all lean forward, enraptured. He is slimmer than Anna has ever seen him and he has no beard. Clean shaven, his face looks younger, but also less familiar. These are Monika's children, Anna learns, and William is showing them a boomerang. Right before the picture was taken he had told them that this bent piece of stick would come back when they learned to throw it the right way. Kurt, Monika's oldest son, wouldn't believe him, so William took them all to the field, threw the boomerang, and it came back.

“You should have seen Kurt's face then,” Monika says. “He can still remember it.”

“That's Willi,” Frau Strauss says, “That's how I remember him.”

In the story that Monika sometimes helps to translate in her clear, though accented English, William is still Willi, a little German boy, crying for the red telephone he had to leave behind. When they were told to flee, Frau Strauss explains, the children were only allowed one toy, and Willi took his tambourine. But, choices like that are never final,
nicht wahr?
Here, in Berlin, it was the lost telephone he craved, the ring it made, the shine of its chrome dial. He was so silent and polite, then, a bit frightened, watching people for a long time before he would say anything. He took a long time to decide whom to trust. Frau Strauss remembers giving him cigarette cards that he lined up on the table and arranged in different ways. He could play like that for hours.

“But we mustn't be sad,” Frau Strauss says, waving her hand as if she were fighting off an annoying fly. “We must be grateful for what we have.”

“Käthe wrote that you were from Breslau, too. I thought it was quite incredible, really, that you and Willi met.” It's Monika who says that, shaking her head. The thought seems to please her, like a completed circle, a missing piece of a puzzle.

At the sound of the word
Breslau
, Frau Strauss rises and rushes into another room from which she emerges with albums of old postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings. “Look,” she says, with girlish excitement. “Look here!” She points to the sights Anna can immediately recognise, but only as their later, tarnished and incomplete selves. “
Jahrhundrethalle
,” she says, “designed by Max Berg. Bigger than the Pantheon,
Vati
always said.
Blücherplatz
, my father took me there.
Mit Gott, für König una Vaterland
, that's what it said, on the monument...
Stadttheater
, a stepping stone to Berlin. Such excellent actors!
Liebichshöhe
with such beautiful flowers and fountains, and the glorietta tower from which you got a view of the whole of Breslau. There was such a fine furniture store on the ground level,
Innen Dekoration W. Quintern & Co.
I remember! We used to go there with Käthe.”

“Now, it's called Partisans' Hill,” Anna says. She wants to say that the glorietta tower was blown up by the German defence, in 1945, but Frau Strauss is not listening.

Frau Strauss recalls a restaurant on the Oder and a big metal rooster that stood there. With thick black lines where the feathers should be. She used to put a 10
pfennig
coin into a slot in the rooster's back and a metal egg would fall from the rooster's belly. Inside there were bonbons. Lemon, cherry, strawberry.

“Oh
Mutti,”
Monika interrupts, laughing softly. “Now, she will never stop,” she says turning to Anna.

“My daughter can never understand,” Frau Strauss says with mock exasperation, “But what can be expected? She was born in Berlin.”

This must be an old family joke, for Monika smiles and pats her mother's hand.

“Do you know this?” Frau Strauss breaks into a song, a joyful, vivid rhyme, from which Anna can only understand one word,
Liebe
.

“Silesian lieder,”
she says. “You know them, don't you.” The song sounds lively, cheeky almost. Frau Strauss's lips twist
mischievously, and Anna smiles, amused. Käthe could have sung such songs, but Käthe never speaks of the past. “What's gone is gone,” is all she has ever said in response to Anna's curiosity. “I want nothing from there.”

Frau Strauss points to the photograph with St. Dorothy's church and the Monopol Hotel, its art nouveau windows gleaming in the sun.

“Here,” she says, pointing to the hotel. “I danced. At my wedding. We were married in
Dorotheenkirche
.” She is smiling at the memory. “When I tried to talk to Käthe about Breslau, she would call me a silly goose. 'It was just a city,' she said. 'What you miss is your Johann, she kept teasing me. The way he looked at you then.”

“The hotel is still there,” Anna says, softly. “You can still see it.”

“No,” Frau Strauss says, the liveliness in her voice dying away. “I don't want to see how it has changed. What you don't know doesn't hurt you,
nicht wahr?”

She is silent for a while, before she turns to Anna, fixing her eyes on hers. “You understand?” she asks and waits for Anna to answer.

“Yes,” Anna says. “I do.”

Frau Strauss smoothes the lace tablecloth, straightening the starched pattern with her hand. Her voice swerves a bit, falters, and she switches back into German, letting Monika translate.

“We were good friends with Käthe. Good, good friends. She — Ulrike, Käthe, and Mitzi. We went to school together, rode horses. My
Vati
was a doctor. He kept such beautiful Arabians in Breslau. 'Look at the curve of their necks,' he kept telling me. He said they moved like dancers, but they were bred for swiftness and endurance of desert treks.”

Frau Strauss points to a photograph in a small, leather-bound album. Käthe is there, her hair tied at the back. The frills of her white blouse are freshly ironed. In the corner, in old German script, an inscription Frau Strauss translates: “To my best friend, Ulrike. With loving thoughts, Käthe Herzmann.” The photograph was taken in the atelier of the Barasch brothers, the stamp on the back of the picture says.

“We were so silly then. So very young. Käthe and Mitzi were good at German composition and at sports. I was good at mathematics, but sports was more important then. Even the nuns thought so.
Gemeinschaft
. You know that word,
nein
? The feeling of being together. The trips the young people made into the mountains, into the woods, in groups, together,... picnics on the meadows. The songs. Having something to live for. Having ideals.

“The three of us, how we laughed. Mitzi's father had a clothing store, on Gartenstrasse, in Breslau. He had a black Chrysler and a driver in uniform who would take us for drives to
Krummhübl
, to the
Scheitniger
Park. We leaned out of the window, to feel the wind in our hair. We liked to skate together, too, on the frozen moat by
Liebichshöhe.
The officers used to come there. So tall and handsome in their uniforms, polished boots. We thought they were like gods.

“How little life means ... be ready at any hour, they sang. We didn't know any better,” Frau Strauss says, softly. “It was still before the war! Before it all went so very, very wrong.”

The photographs of Breslau spread on the table may account for the ease with which Anna imagines Käthe and Ulrike together. Young girls dreaming of caresses. Of strong arms that could defy danger. Sneaking glances at the muscular thighs of German heroes, at their stone penises. Giggling at the erect neck of a swan settling between Leda's legs. Walking hand in hand, swinging their purses, aware of admiring looks of passing soldiers.

“Is that when Käthe met William's father?” Anna asks.

“Helmut?” Frau Strauss says and nods.

Helmut. Helmut Rust. In Anna's mind, William's father begins his existence as a shining torso of a demigod, beautiful in his iron, unmoveable presence.

“It was Mitzi's brother, Bernd who brought Helmut over. My Johann was drafted then, and I missed him so much. Helmut and Bernd were both in uniforms. Tall, ramrod straight. So handsome. So very handsome.”

In Frau Strauss's story the invasion of Poland is called the Polish Campaign. “The summer before the Polish Campaign,”
she says. The time when Willi was conceived. “Oh, Mitzi had her eye on Helmut, but she didn't want to stand in Käthe's way. They even broke up for a while, until Mitzi went to the Baltic sea, for her holidays and wrote to Käthe wishing her and Helmut all the best. Wrote such a funny postcard. About sailors who sway their hips when they walk. Asking Käthe if Helmut was everything she had wished for.”

The summer of 1939, filled with incessant talk on the radio about the Polish corridor, the indignities suffered by the
Volk.
Such a hot summer, unusually beautiful. Käthe and Helmut together among the yarrow, blue chicory, mugworth, shepherd's purse. It just happened. They were young. They were in love. He was to leave soon.

“Did they have time to get married? Do you have his picture?” Anna asks. She is curious to see if she could spot William's shadow in his father's face. “What did her parents say?”

But Frau Strauss has no pictures of Helmut. None. They all perished. Left in Breslau. No, Käthe did not marry Helmut. There was a quarrel. There was a big, big quarrel. When Willi was born Helmut was no longer in Breslau. He never came back, never even saw his son.