Restitution (30 page)

‘You kept your boots?’

‘They were good boots. Papi always told me to look after my footwear. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away when I came to London so I kept them.’

We turn a bend in the road that feels familiar. Trzebiatow, the sign says. Treptow in my time. Michael drives over a stone bridge. Below the river curves a lazy bend around the steep banks. Boys
skim stones and men fish. I point to a soaring church tower. ‘Luther preached his sermons there and persuaded German Pomeranians to turn Protestant. Now it’s a Polish Catholic
church.’

Michael smiles at the irony.

‘You’re supposed to be able to see the house from the tower but we never could.’ We pull up outside the town’s only hotel, a plain but neat establishment on the square.
Some of the gabled houses have been repaired but most are crumbling.

‘Must have been a smart little marketplace once.’ Michael gets out and walks round the car to hold the door open for me.

‘It was.’ I can see it all: Papi smiling as some heifers reached more than he’d expected; grain merchants jostling with farmers; Lena gossiping with a friend; Mami sitting in
the café drinking coffee and smoking. ‘When
they
came to power some of the chatter died down.’ The market lost its bustle. ‘People looked over their shoulders before
they spoke. And the Jewish merchants slowly disappeared.’

‘We could check in now if you want.’

‘Let’s see if we can find the caretaker and get the key. Then I can relax.’

The trip involves several U-turns and consultations with a street map. At last we find the apartment block where the caretaker lives and Michael rings the bell. A boy in a Manchester United
shirt runs down to tell us in a mixture of German and American-English – of which he’s very proud – that his mother is out. He goes upstairs to find the house key and returns
empty-handed. ‘Perhaps old man has it?’

‘Which man?’ Michael asks.

‘Man who phone.’ The boy shrugs.

We agree to come back after dinner when the mother will have returned and walk back through peaceful streets to the hotel. ‘Look.’ Michael points up to the roof of an old house.
‘A stork’s nest.’

‘I wonder if they still build nests on the stable roof at Alexanderhof.’

‘You never told me who actually owns Alexanderhof now,’ Michael says.

‘The Polish state. They used it as a children’s home until about five years ago.’

‘You’re not tempted to buy it back?’

‘What would I do with a decaying old house? For me it will be enough to see it again.’

‘Sounds like the kind of place that might make a hotel.’

The idea appeals. ‘Perhaps it would be the best thing for the old house, people coming and going, fresh faces. It would . . .’

‘What?’

‘Help drive out the ghosts, I suppose.’ Erase the image of the four of us sitting in the kitchen with the snow falling outside.

We unload the car and check into the hotel. ‘Nice little place. Did you come here as a child?’

‘Frequently, before the war. And even after it had started. Right up until the time . . .’ Right up until the day Papi was arrested.

Michael’s expression tells me I don’t have to explain which event I mean. ‘We came into town to try and buy sugar for the jam we were making. It was impossible – all the
sugar had gone and Mami said we’d leave it, we’d have to make do with what we had at home. Mami wanted to be outdoors. She said she felt calmer in the fresh air.’

Pomerania, 1944

A short shower had cleared the muggy July air and flowers and shrubs glowed in the clear evening sun. Alix was thankful they hadn’t hoed up all the flowerbeds. She still
missed the borders Mami’d had dug up. Carrots and radishes now sprouted where giant poppies, hollyhocks, phloxes and cornflowers had bloomed. Vegetables were essential, naturally, but a few
delphiniums and lupins were good for the soul.

Mami hummed as she picked raspberries. ‘Times like this I could almost be back in the Tyrol. We grew lots of fruit there. Your grandfather loved cherries.’

Behind them Lena sighed.

‘You remember, don’t you, Lena? And Anton’s father grew fruit too.’ Mami grew silent as she always did when she mentioned Preizler’s name.

‘I remember.’ Lena sounded curt. ‘All those wasps swarming round.’ She held out a hand for Mami’s basket. ‘Let me take that.’ As she passed it over
Mami’s face seemed to lose its temporary glow. Hope was hard to cling to. It had flourished for twenty-four hours while they’d thought Hitler dead. Then plummeted when they heard his
voice on the radio shrieking for revenge. Papi had telephoned Mami and told her he’d stay in Berlin even though his friends had already been arrested.

‘Come home for God’s sake.’ Mami’d sounded desperate. And scared. ‘Hide in the forest.’

But he hadn’t. Probably scared that if he evaded arrest they’d come for Mami and Alix too. They’d already heard of wives sent to camps, children placed in orphanages or
adopted. He’d stay in the open, like a beast drawing the hounds away from the young in the lair.

Lena and Alix carried the baskets through the hall. The telephone rang and Mami came running in, biting her lip. ‘Wait in the kitchen with Lena,
Liebling.’
Did she feel a
premonition?

Lena closed the kitchen door and rinsed the fruit in huge metal colanders and found precious sugar in the pantry. ‘A good haul.’ She nodded in approval as she tipped raspberries into
saucepans and added the last of the carefully hoarded sugar. ‘Watch these for me and I’ll pour you a glass of milk. You look parched.’

Alix stirred the saucepans, breathing in the aroma of high summer. Almost impossible to believe in anything bad happening when you could smell blackcurrants, raspberries and sugar. She
didn’t hear Mami open the door but some sense alerted Alix to her presence. ‘When?’ she asked her mother.

‘This evening. That was one of the Abwehr secretaries. Poor girl, she’s taking a risk just telephoning us.’ Mami came in and slumped into a chair.

‘I’m fetching you a
Kitsch.’
Lena slammed Alix’s milk down on the table and went to the pantry.

‘I don’t need it.’

‘You’re having it, Maria.’

Only rarely did Lena call Mami by her Christian name.

‘Where did they take him?’

‘Plötzensee prison.’

Alix felt herself shake. To control herself she forced herself to focus on the familiar objects in the kitchen: the saucepans and sieves and the pottery sugar jar, the sailing ships on the Dutch
tiles behind the stove.

‘Drink it.’ Lena pushed the glass at Mami. ‘Ring Anton Preizler. He might know what’s happening.’

‘Anton?’ Mami sipped her
Kirsch,
the pupils of her eyes large and black. ‘I don’t know. It might incriminate us in some way.’

‘He’s your friend, isn’t he?’ Lena sounded harsh. ‘He knows people. He has ideas. Use the connection, Maria.’

Mami pushed aside the glass and rested her head on her hands. ‘I don’t know, Lena, I just don’t know.’ She let out a long moan. ‘Peter let them take him to save us,
God help him.’

Days passed. They heard nothing. Mami went up by train to Berlin in a linen and silk suit and dashing (but not too much so) straw hat. She took a parcel of clothes and a Bible
for Papi, spending the night with friends. She returned the following evening, still carrying the parcel. ‘They told me he didn’t need it.’ Despite the heat her face was
paper-white. ‘I must have talked to twenty people but nobody knew what was happening. He’s not on the trial list.’

‘That’s good.’ Lena took the parcel from her. ‘That Justice Freisler is demented, a judge from hell.’

Mami removed her little straw hat and white gloves. Her fingernails were buffed and polished as meticulously as if she’d been attending a lunch party.

The telephone rang. Alix answered. ‘Tell your mother another six were hanged this morning.’ The caller hung up. Alix stared at the telephone.

Alix

Pomerania, July 2002

I finish my story and brush a non-existent strand of hair off my brow, feeling as though I’ve exposed myself and wonder whether Michael can see me readjusting, tidying
away emotions.

‘I can’t imagine how you must have felt when you heard the news. It must have been dreadful for you and your mother.’

I manage a nod. He looks around the bar, giving me time to recover. The room’s decorated with old sepia photographs of the area, showing men wrapped in layers of fur pulling sleds into the
marketplace across thick snow. ‘You had harsh winters out here.’

‘It’s probably milder than it used to be. When I was little we used our sledge most winters. The farm horses would pull us around the estate.’ The bells on the
Haflingers’ harness jingled and the runners swooshed over the snow. I was warm underneath the soft cashmere shawl Lena used to drape over my knees.

‘We moved round a lot, but when I was a kid we spent some years in northern Michigan,’ he says. ‘We had a lake nearby that used to freeze. I loved skating.’

I feel the wistful expression on my own face. I’ve missed so many years – Michael as a child, skating, tobogganing and building snowmen.

‘You had a magical childhood.’ Please God, don’t let me sound bitter. I have so much to be grateful for.

He puts a hand on mine. ‘I was happy with the Whites. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have been as happy with my real mother. But I think you did the right thing. God, Alix, how
could you have managed a child by yourself in Germany, in 1945?’

‘Plenty of women managed.’ Something’s caught up in my throat. ‘But I’m glad you were happy, Michael. I always wondered. In those days it was hard to trace adopted
children. Nobody would help.’

We’ve already had this conversation; I’ve explained how I wanted to find him, how I made inquiries through the Red Cross and various other agencies in the fifties and sixties. But I
feel I have to keep repeating my explanation. Perhaps the person I’m really trying to convince is myself.

‘Sounds like the only person really hurt in this whole thing was you.’ His voice is gentle. His gaze is steady and warm. ‘As I grew older I became increasingly curious about my
blood parents. The only thing I feared was that you wouldn’t want to see me.’

‘Never.’ How fierce I sound. And yet, I don’t know how I would have reacted if Michael had turned up twenty or thirty years ago, I don’t know how I would have explained
him to Robin.

‘Having kids made me desperate to know more about you.’

‘I can’t wait to meet Stephanie and the boys.’

He pats his pocket. ‘I keep trying not to call them all the time. It’s darn expensive. But they’re all so curious. Steph’s been pushing me to find you ever since I saw
that damn Bosnian documentary.’

‘She understood how dreadful it was for you to believe what you imagined.’

‘Yes.’ And my son’s confident, American voice is almost faltering now. ‘She was so pleased when I made that first trip to see you.’

‘And tomorrow we see the house.’ I put my glass very carefully on the metal table between us. ‘And I shall explain about Gregor.’ I’ve tried to talk about him on
the train but we’ve always had other people sitting near us. And Gregor has felt like a phantom, someone I might almost have imagined. I hope that walking round the old house will make him
feel more substantial.

‘It’s all right.’ Michael gives my hand a brief squeeze. ‘Don’t worry about anything.’

And again I might almost be looking into Papi’s tender eyes. Papi was always so gentle. It’s beyond me how Mami could have done what I suspected she’d done. But I was a young
girl when it had happened. Perhaps I misunderstood.

Strange how this trip keeps taking me back to my mother rather than my Resistance hero father: Mami as a young girl, growing up in the mountains, coming to Vienna to act and then marrying Papi
and moving here. What a change it must have been for her.

I blamed my mother for so much, yet now when I think of her I feel a wistfulness that surprises me. I wish she could have seen her grandson.

Marie

Pomerania, 1926

No matter how she phrased the telegram Marie knew it would cause Anton pain. He was trying so hard to make a success of the job he’d finally found in a Munich timber firm
exporting wood from Austria to Hamburg. She hadn’t seen him for nearly a year now but Lena had written and told her about his business struggles. Marie had thought of asking Lena to break the
news to Anton, but that would be cowardly. She owed him more.

Her guilt felt like a localized dull ache, easily forgettable when wedding preparations swept her up, but apt to throb its way into her consciousness when she rested. She and Anton had never
been lovers, never even had a relationship. He had no
right
to make her feel guilty. She’d never felt for him what she’d felt for Viktor Vargá.

Enough of Viktor Vargá. She’d never see him again. Nor would Eva, probably. It was self-indulgent and shocking even to think of him now.

Peter was a darling and she liked it here in the north. She’d had enough of Viennese life, the gossip, the backbiting. Let her come to live in flat old Pomerania, as Peter described it,
and settle down with these sensible north Germans. Peter didn’t arouse such contradictory emotions in her as did Viktor and Anton; he wouldn’t threaten her peace of mind. He was
handsome and clever and straightforward. He’d promised her she could redecorate his eighteenth-century manor house exactly as she wished.

Berlin to Stettin, the nearest sizeable town to Peter’s estate, was an easy train ride. Marie was up for the day, sorting out wedding matters with her fiancé. ‘We’ll
have your friend Eva and her husband to stay once we’re married,’ Peter had said.

‘A socialist publisher – in your house?’

‘They sound fun. And I want to see Eva perform in one of her Berlin revues.’

‘You’d probably be the only Junker in the audience.’

He grinned. ‘You’d be surprised.’

And Peter’s idea regarding Lena was perfect. They needed a housekeeper, he said. Someone who was more of a friend than a servant. Someone loyal and practical.