Restitution (37 page)

‘I can only guess. She was furious that he hadn’t managed to get your father safely released and that he’d threatened you the previous night. She was terrified that they were
now captives and the Reds were in the grounds of the house. She hated him for that and yet . . .’ He breaks off. ‘I can only put together bits and pieces about them – and Lena
too.’

‘Lena?’ Again I think of our housekeeper’s dislike of Eva.

‘It’s just supposition,’ Gregor says. ‘But this is what I think happened.’

Marie

Pomerania, 1945

Marie ran to the boot room. As she passed the cellar steps she heard Gregor open the front door. A male voice, cultured and deep, spoke to him. She knew she should hurry but
she couldn’t help pausing to listen. It sounded like . . . It
was
Viktor. It was really him. After all these years. She shivered in her furs. Gregor was showing him into the salon.
‘You made yourself at home, then?’ he said to Gregor before they closed the door. Marie sank down on the steps.

She could go into the salon now and stand underneath all those photographs of herself in various tragic and heroic roles. He couldn’t harm her. He’d always liked her, not loved her,
but liking and respect would be enough. He’d know that Maria Weissmüller wasn’t one of
them.
And Gregor would speak up for her. She groped for the stair rail and pulled
herself up the steps and towards the salon. Gregor had shut the door. She was reaching for the handle when she remembered Anton. Upstairs. Bound. Helpless as a baby. Her eyes switched from the
closed salon door to the staircase. Anton hadn’t shouted out to her, hadn’t begged her to help him, but it was as though he were calling her name over and over again: Marie, Marie,
Marie.

She was eleven again and Anton was begging her to tell him the answers to the arithmetic test. She couldn’t let him sway her. She’d walk into that room and reintroduce herself to
Viktor. Place herself in his custody with dignity and the certainty that he’d do what he could for her. Let Anton take the consequences of his actions.

Damn, damn, damn, she couldn’t do this. She let go of the door handle, found herself moving towards the staircase. Fool, fool, for not running into the forest after Alix. She was placing
herself in alliance with a Gestapo officer now. Viktor would not be able to protect her if she continued up these stairs. Prison. Torture. Rape. The cattle wagons heading east: Gregor had said
almost nothing about Kolyma but Marie knew what the name meant. Peter had told her about Soviet camps. Or perhaps they’d just take her onto the terrace and . . .

Still time to go back downstairs and plead with Viktor.

Please Marie! Don’t leave me.
She had to untie him so that he could at least defend himself.

Once she unlocked his door she was irrevocably committed. She found herself continuing to climb the stairs and walk down the passage to her room. The key turned in her hand and the decision had
already been made. Anton tried to sit up, wincing as the silk scarves dug into him. ‘You came at last, Marie. I knew you would. Can we get to Peter’s shotgun, do you think? If we had a
weapon we could put up a fight.’

‘We’re not going to fight.’ She found nail scissors in a drawer and sliced through the silk scarves. ‘Come on! The Russians are already in the salon. We have to get past
the door quickly.’ Anton’s legs shook after his night of confinement; he grabbed at her for support and her coat slipped from her shoulders. She put a finger to her lips. She led him
down the stairs; he was still moving stiffly after his night tied up, and every time he stood on a loose board she winced, expecting the salon door to burst open. At the bottom she hesitated until
she’d heard the murmur of voices in the salon. ‘To the boot room,’ she whispered. ‘Very quickly.’ He managed to keep that boot from squeaking as they crept over the
marble floor. As they passed the salon door Marie shuddered. Just two centimetres of wooden door between the two groups. Centimetres and whole ideologies, whole lives. She hurried Anton past the
door.

In the boot room he started to talk, to protest. She pulled out the little pistol she’d kept in her coat pocket. ‘There are soldiers out there.’ She put her head out of the
door and listened. No sound of the guttural voices. They must have moved back to the front of the house.

‘Maria . . .’ Anton put up a hand in protest. The effort seemed to cost him; his eyes rolled and he staggered.

‘Shh.’

‘There’s still a chance, you know. Our troops are only kilometres away, we could still—’

‘Viktor Vargá is already in the house. He’s working with Soviet intelligence.’

He looked disbelieving. ‘How—?’

Vargá and Vavilov are the same man.’

Now Anton understood her questioning of Gregor about his superior last night. ‘Marie, you should go back, he won’t harm you. Leave me here.’

‘No.’ She kept the gun pointed at him and he walked out into the snow. ‘It’s too late now. I’m implicated.’

If she let Viktor catch Anton he’d have to pass him on to the NKVD. The NKVD would extract from him the information that the Baroness von Matke had released him. They’d hunt her down
like a beast. And yet she’d done all this for a man who last night had pointed a gun at Alix’s head and threatened her. He’d failed to help her release Peter. The Gestapo officers
in Berlin had all but laughed at Anton when he’d taken her to that meeting, saying that they didn’t have any idea where Peter von Matke was now. Their supercilious gazes had fallen on
her too. ‘Go back and defend your family,’ they’d told Anton. ‘Take your fancy woman with you.’ And she’d insisted on him doing just that, hoping against all
common sense that Peter would have found his way back home. Even then Anton had insisted on packing that ridiculous hamper, as though this were a romantic winter outing.

All his promises had been like those biscuit tins in grocers’ shops: full of nothing. She should shoot him herself really. Return to Viktor and tell him where to find the body. But by now
he’d have found the unlocked bedroom, the cut silk scarves. She was no longer an innocent civilian. She’d have to plead and beg. And she couldn’t, not to Viktor.

And she was tired, tired. Peter was lost to her. If he wasn’t here and he wasn’t in Berlin, he’d be in a camp. She knew what happened in those camps as Allied soldiers
approached, they took out prisoners and executed them.

And then there was Alix. Her body almost shook with longing for her child. Alix might yet survive, but she had misunderstood everything last night. There’d been no chance to explain. Her
daughter, her adored daughter, still hated her. Life, past and present, seemed to have tied itself round her and weighed her down in its chains. She couldn’t act her way out of this
scene.

She noticed that Anton’s foot still gave him trouble; he dragged it through the snow. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t joined the Wehrmacht. . . How differently things might have
played out if he had.

They’d reached the forest now. He was shivering.

And this play had run to its conclusion. It was almost time for the curtain. She knew now how it should go from here. Peter’s image flashed through her mind, disturbing her calmness,
causing her to hold her breath in pain. But he’d only gone ahead. She would join him.

Anton tripped in the snow and for a moment she felt remorse. But there really was no other way.

She thought she heard voices, guttural men’s voices speaking a foreign language. Time was running out. She pointed at a hollow beside a beech tree.

‘Maria!’

‘Sit here with me, Anton.’ She lowered herself into the hollow. The snow was hardly cold at all now. She sighed as her body relaxed. Anton flopped next to her. She tightened her grip
on the gun, considering how she could remove the pillbox from her pocket with her left hand.

‘It’s all right, you don’t need that now.’ His voice was calm. ‘I understand. But if the Russians come . . .’

She nodded, praying it wouldn’t come to that. Let it be like one of those summer excursions back in Meran when they’d walk out with a picnic to the Botanical Gardens and sit talking
among the scented flowers.

She put down the gun and took out the pillbox. In another minute her fingers would be too cold to operate the clasp. Four sleeping tablets each – that should be enough in this cold. Gregor
had watched her last night in the kitchen as she’d taken out the tablets to use on Anton. She’d been hoarding them for so long, but the doctor had never asked any questions when she
asked for more. She’d hoped the young ones would use the night to escape but they hadn’t. The snowstorm had detained them . . .

Anton stared at the pills. ‘I’ve got a flask,’ he said at last. ‘Best French brandy.’

Better than the melted snow she’d thought they’d have to use. She and Anton might have been having a picnic. The thought almost made her smile as she washed down the tablets, the
brandy setting her body aglow.

‘It could have been different.’ Anton took back the flask. ‘There was a moment, years back . . . I could have chosen something different. I see that now.’

She hardly had the energy to ask him what he meant, but something was still on her mind, something she’d wondered about for years now. Last night Gregor had accused Anton of being
responsible for having him and Eva driven out of the country. Anton had denied it. And yet it didn’t seem likely to have happened without his involvement.

‘Tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘Gregor Fischer and his mother. I didn’t believe you when you said it wasn’t you that had them deported. You told your friends in Berlin all about Eva’s Jewish father. As
if having a politically unsound husband wasn’t enough. God knows what happened to her.’ She remembered Eva acting Celia to her own Rosalind in that other forest, the one where there was
no clock.

‘It wasn’t me.’ He spoke quietly.

‘You met her here again when you came to dinner all those years ago. You remembered who she was and you made sure the authorities knew.’

‘No.’ He held out a hand for his tablets. So he’d accepted this ending as inevitable. ‘Not me.’

‘Gregor said it was the Gestapo.’

‘Berlin . . . not me. Wouldn’t interfere with them. And I was never interested in Jews . . . High society was my area.’

‘They sent you to spy on us.’ It didn’t seem to matter now.

‘I tell you I didn’t, Marie.’ He turned to look her in the eye. ‘This is the end, no time for lies.’

‘So why did Berlin suddenly pick on Eva? They left most half-Jews alone until later in the war.’ How complicated it all seemed. Perhaps her mind was already slowing down.

‘Someone simply didn’t like Eva. Someone wanted her gone. I’m certain it was personal. It used to happen all the time. Children would ring up and denounce their mothers for
listening to the BBC He placed his tablets in his mouth and took a mouthful of brandy. ‘It’s a mortal sin, suicide.’ But he was going to do it, anyway. How he’d loved her,
all these years. Enough to do this for her.

‘You must throw yourself on God’s mercy,’ she told him. But what he’d just said preoccupied her fading consciousness. ‘Who on earth could have anything against
Eva?’ He’d taken the tablets now, there might not be time for him to tell her everything.

‘I came to the house, the day after the dinner party in thirty-eight. Only you and Lena were here. Peter had taken Eva and the children sailing.’

Six years ago her darling husband had removed them from the heaviness oppressing the house following the dinner party. She’d stayed behind with a headache.

‘You were very jolly,’ Anton said.

Well, she was an actress after all. Quite capable of putting on a good show.

‘But Lena wasn’t jolly. She dropped a glass, do you remember? So unlike Lena.’

He remembered. Marie had looked up at the sound of breaking glass. ‘Are you all right?’ he had asked.

‘I do apologize.’ Lena sounded calm but her hands trembled.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Marie frowned. ‘How hot you look, Lena. Sit down and rest.’

‘I’ll get a cloth.’ Lena tugged at a piece of hair that had escaped her usually neat bun.

‘I must be going too.’ Anton had picked up his cap.

‘What is it?’ he asked, closing the salon door and following her into the hall. Something was going on; Lena didn’t just start dropping glasses without good reason.

‘Nothing, Anton.’ She smiled at him, a tired smile that barely reached her eyes. ‘How’s the foot?’

‘Hardly troubles me at all.’ Her shrewd stare told him she knew he was lying. So now they both knew the other was trying to cover up something.

‘Tell me, Lena.’

‘I’m just worried about someone, that’s all. A friend. Nobody you know.’ She clenched the broken shards of glass so hard her palm began to bleed.

‘Your friend’s lucky to have you to worry about her. But you always were loyal.’

‘Her husband’s smitten with someone else. Supposing he leaves her?’ Her words were coming out in a gabble. ‘I don’t know what to do about it.’

His heart ached for her, so worried for her friend. He remembered Lena herself as a small girl going to school without warm clothes or brushed hair because her mother’d run off with some
wastrel. It was always the likes of Lena and her friend who suffered, those who couldn’t take care of themselves. Just like his father. That’s what had attracted Anton to the Party,
their recognition that the little people counted, that families mattered. They were all Germans together and needed to take care of one another. This case of Lena’s friend was one where the
state should step in. ‘Can the other woman be sent away?’

She looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just one call to the rival’s local Gestapo HQ. Or a letter. That’s all it takes. Tell your friend to say the other woman tells jokes about the Führer.’

Poor misguided Lena. And yet Marie didn’t have the strength to feel anything more than sadness for her. Snatches of prayers the nuns had taught her flitted through
Marie’s mind, forgotten all the years she’d been married to a Protestant. Anton’s words were coming more slowly now. She no longer felt the cold.