Nothing But Fear (8 page)

Papa Schneider loved her more than the horses, loved her as much as he was able to love anyone, and Mother
was included in the family portrait alongside his dog. They were on an outing in the countryside. Grandmother was sitting in the grass with Eva in her arms, Papa Schneider was reading a book, and Mother had on a short dress – it was almost transparent – and a pageboy haircut. She was standing next to Bello looking out at me from the painting in the dining room when we sat down to eat, and Mother told me that it had been painted by Magnus Zeller. He was one of the expressionists from the München group,
Der Blaue Reiter
. Papa Schneider supported him and bought his pictures – he was also a patron of Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde. They had all hung on the walls until 1937, when he had been forced to take them down – they were what Hitler called ‘degenerate art' – and he rolled them up and hid them in the cellar. While Nolde's fear led him to paint flowers, Pechstein and Zeller took up landscape painting. Two of them hung in heavy gold frames in our living room – one of mountains and flowing water in the Harz mountains, where Papa Schneider went on his fishing trips, and another of some sombre trees by a lake. The others had been taken by Auntie Eva – and that was not the end of it. She had taken everything.

It was just like in the fairytale. The stepsister was evil, and Mother had grown up with a snake that grew more poisonous with every year that passed. Eva was fat and ugly and red-haired, and even though she never had to achieve anything and had everything served up on a plate, it fell through her fingers and shattered around her. She was put on a circus horse and fell off and never got on again. She
was as tone deaf as a set of bagpipes and conjugated French verbs out of all recognition. Eva was father's little girl and was sat on his knee and applauded for nothing, but it was no good. On the contrary it made the worm of envy turn more viciously in her whenever she hit the ball into the net and she watched Mother walk round in her tennis skirt being everything that she was not – beautiful and popular. Mother dressed her in smart clothes, put her hair up and took her along to parties when she became a teenager. Eva was a wallflower and her birthday parties attracted only bores. To inject a bit of life into it, Mother made a punch and dished it out, and the party took off. They let their hair down, laughing and dancing and behaving like wild things, chasing up and down the house, and Eva kissed a boy – and the party was over. One of the guests fell over and fainted and had to be taken to hospital because he had a dicky heart. Mother had put speed in the punch, and she got Eva to swear and cross her heart and hope to die that she would not tell a soul – and then the snake struck.

Mother was sent away to the best girls' boarding school that could be found, Reinhardswaldschule outside Kassel. It was built on a hill looking out across the town, and the main building was surrounded by a park, by the long dormitory buildings and by a wall. The gate was locked. This was where royalty, the aristocracy and big industrialists sent their daughters to keep them out of trouble, and her school friends were called Sayn-Wittgenstein and Thüssen and Thurn and Taxis. The principal made a point of it when he came to Mother's name, saying it aloud at morning assembly:
‘Hildegard Lydia… Voll!' She still bore her father's name – she had never been adopted – and it was just as embarrassing as being illegitimate. Mother ran and rode and jumped and beat them at tennis and played the piano and provided entertainment when they had evenings off, and that would have to compensate for lack of family and title.

Outside the school the world was a dangerous place. They were not allowed to go into town, and most forbidden of all were cinemas and cafés – not to mention the ‘
Tanzcafe
' which had music and dance and, worst of all, men. Men belonged in another world and were the closest you could get to dying. Every other Saturday the girls were driven in a bus with blacked-out windows to a
Konditorei
that had been closed to the public for the occasion. There they ate cakes, drank tea and made polite conversation, while their teachers perched like blackbirds observing them, and there was no music. They had to be in bed – with the lights out – at ten o'clock, but Mother smuggled gramophone records into the dormitory and held midnight parties. She would stick a pencil through the hole in the middle, and they would turn the record with their fingers, stick a matchstick with a piece of greaseproof paper in the grooves and listen to the latest hits –
Benjamin, ich hab' nichts anzuzieh'n
– and, when they got to the final exams, Mother and her best friend, Inge Wolf, bunked off and went to the cinema. They hid among the padded chairs and cried so much they didn't know what had hit them, and afterwards they sat smiling with redrimmed eyes, aching and dizzy and tender all over.

Mother got away from Reinhardswaldschule in 1939 and
went to Berlin to study at the university – political science and American history – and there she met Horst Heilmann and fell in love. He was nineteen like her and called her ‘
Hildchen
', and she called him ‘
Horstchen
', and Mother threw herself into his arms, opened her heart and was given back the life that had been taken away from her before it had begun. They were engaged when the war broke out, and Horst entered the
Wehrmacht
, where he was given the task of breaking codes for intelligence in Berlin, while Mother did her student service as a tram conductor – her ‘Studiendienst' – and was photographed in uniform and used for propaganda because she was young and blonde:
‘Deutsche Mädel stehen überall ihren Mann. Front und Heimat Hand in Hand!'
¹
She posed as a conductor in
Der Silberspiegel
and as a gymnast in
Reichssportblatt
– ‘
Frisch und froh!
' She was a pin-up in bathing suit in the SS magazines that did the rounds of the front line, so that Mother's conquests included Belgium, Holland, France, Tunisia. It gave them a good laugh, Mother and Horst, and they passed the magazines around, reading the captions aloud when they were with his friends – Kuckhoff, who was in the theatre, and Harro Schulze-Boysen, who taught foreign affairs at the university and made himself out to be a Nazi even though he was a fervent anti-fascist. His wife, whose name was Libertas, was employed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and they watched American movies –
Gone with the Wind
– and listened to allied radio stations. At night they posted flyers
and hung posters up – ‘
Das Nazi-Paradies. Krieg, Hunger, Lüge, Gestapo. Wie lange noch?
'
²
– and Harro carried a gun. They pinned their hopes on the USA and the Soviet Union and prayed that one day would see an end to it, and so it did.

In the autumn of 1942 Mother went on holiday to occupied Paris with Inge Wolf, and when she returned to Berlin Horstchen was not at home. She rang Harro and Libertas. There was no answer. No answer from Kuckhoff, nor from anyone else in their circle. Mother rushed over to the last person who to her knowledge knew Horstchen. Liane lived in Berlin-Schøneberg on Viktoria-Luise-Platz. She was at home and let Mother in and was in a state of total confusion. They had been arrested, the lot of them, Arvid Harnack and his wife, Mildred, Günter Weisenborn, John Graudenz – more than a hundred of them. Mother's head swam, she was in shock and ran back to her room and began ringing the authorities to ask what had happened to Horst, Horst Heilmann, her beloved Horst! No one could tell her. At his workplace she was just told that he was away on official business, a ‘
Dienstreise
', and, instead of giving her information, the police interrogated her. Who was she? What connections did she have to these people? In the end she got hold of Himmler's secretary, sobbing down the telephone and asking where her Horstchen was and what had they done? It felt as if there was no one at the other end, as if the voice came from the void.

‘Er ist verhaftet und wird vernommen, Sie haben sich beim Volksgerichtshof einzufinden, und zwar sofort. Heil Hitler!'
³

She struggled to understand. Horstchen under arrest? And she was to appear before the court? Against all better reasoning Mother went, ran up the stairs and down the corridors, until she saw the guards marching towards her with a man. It was Horst! She called his name, and he looked up. He was in handcuffs, and they dragged him past her – there was nothing Mother could do – she only heard Horstchen whisper from a great distance.

‘Flee, Hildchen. Flee!'

Mother had no idea where she should flee, did not dare return to Victoria Studienanstalt but did so anyway, and, when she returned home, Papa Schneider was standing in her room with a coat over his arm and a suitcase packed. He had done everything in his power to ensure that it was not the Gestapo who would be waiting for her. There was no time to lose – Horst Heilmann was accused of high treason and she was in mortal danger and had to disappear immediately. He handed her money and papers and an envelope with a letter in case she got into difficulties, and Mother thanked him and wept and left for Graz. She could think of nothing but Horstchen, who was gone, and the abyss opened up inside her and never closed again.

I
had only one wish on my birthday and that was not to have a birthday, and I lay awake the night before imagining time leapfrogging the day without anyone noticing it so it would never happen, and then I walked into the dining room where Mother and Father would be singing

Knüdchen hat Geburtstag, tra-la-la-la-la!

Knüdchen hat Geburtstag, heisa-hopsa-sa!

There would be ring cake with candles – a
Gugelhupf
– and toffees round my plate and presents from Grandmother and the Hagenmüller family and from Auntie Gustchen and Auntie Inge, who lived on Majorca and sent many happy returns and 10 Deutschmarks. I was given everything Mother and Father could give – a bicycle, an Optimist dinghy and a moped when I was fifteen – and it would all be taken away from me during the course of the day and punctured or sunk or destroyed. When I blew out the candles and opened the last package all I hoped was that it would be a bomb and would bring on the end of the world.

It was always too much and so wrong. Father had brought the bicycle back from Germany, had bought it at Neckermann with the slogan ‘
Neckermann macht's möglich!
', though it wasn't clear what they made possible. It had wide white tyres and no one north of the Alps rode a bike like it. I knew in advance that the tyres would have been let down when I rode home from school and I could wheel it home and repair it and keep on repairing it until I gave up. I was
covered in shame when I stood up in class and the words ‘Knud's birthday' were written on the blackboard, and Miss Kronov had said that I would now hand round sweeties. The idea was that you would go round with a tin of boiled sweets and everyone would take one. Mother had spent a whole week filling little cellophane bags with liquorice and wine gums and home-made chocolates and tied bows around them. When I handed them round the class, they all made faces and then they sang, exploding in laughter when they finished off their ‘Happy birthday to Knud' with ‘Heisa-hopsa-sa!' The worst was to come. I handed round the rest of the bags in the break and invited them to my birthday party. Then it was over and I was left more or less in peace while they ate sweets, until they threw up and asked if there were any more and said, ‘See ya, then!'

I was beside myself with terror when the time came and they rang the bell and came through the front door, one, two, three at a time dropping a five-crown coin in my hand – it wasn't wrapped up and that was what people gave in 1970. With twenty in the class that made 100 crowns. There was no way around it. I had to let them in – Pia and Jeanne and Marianne and Georg and Kim and Michael and Jesper and Lisbet and Annemette and Jens-Erik and Poul and Jørgen and the rest of them. They had come to celebrate my birthday, and they all had one thing on their mind – to have a cheap laugh at our expense and tell their parents about it afterwards. And they got what they came for.

Mother had laid the table in the dining-room – white tablecloth, place cards and flags, balloons and candles – and
beside each plate lay a package with presents – crayons, marbles, picture lotto – and she smiled and said, ‘So, Kinder, now sit you down and have a good enjoyment!' She served up hot waffles and
Spritzkuchen
and
Kartoffelpuffer
with apple preserve, and they stared at it all and looked around for all the things they were used to – the buttered rolls that weren't there, the banana layer cake that wasn't there, the soda pop that had been swapped for Nesquick. They wouldn't enjoy a single mouthful, that was for sure. They sat there, stabbing and spoiling and spilling on the floor, and they burst the balloons and drew on the tablecloth and sniggered and couldn't wait for Mother to start on the entertainment. She had organized competitions, and we played
Blindekuh
and
Wettfischen
and
Mäusejagd
and
Papiertütenlauf
, and they could throw balls at cans and there were prizes for everyone.

‘Auf die Plätze, fertig – los!'

And ‘Ready, steady, go!' they started – making fun and hurling balls, making Mother run around picking them up while they grabbed what they could and filled their pockets with sweets. I pretended I didn't hear them teasing and putting on a German accent and calling me ‘
Knüdchen
' like Mother did, slapping each other on the back, breathless with laughter. The important thing was to get through the day. No matter what I did, I could not avoid the catastrophe waiting ahead – it was an annual tradition – and I shuddered at the thought that it would soon be evening and time for Mother to bring out her accordion. Father kept himself in the background, and they assembled in the
street outside and were each given a long stick with a paper shade and a candle hanging inside. There were lanterns of all colours and with moons and stars and mysterious faces that shone in the darkness. Then we shuffled into a long line, and Mother began playing birthday songs, singing
‘Knüdchen hat Geburtstag, tra-la-la-la-la'
, and slowly we set off, Pia and Jeanne and Marianne and Georg and Kim and Michael and Jesper and Lisbet and Annemette and Jens-Erik and Poul and Jørgen and me and all the others. We walked down Hans Ditlevsensgade and up Peter Freuchensvej and round the estate, Mother with her accordion at the head now singing
‘Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne'
– and wherever we went people stood outside their houses and followed the procession and raised their right arm in a Hitler salute.