Restitution (38 page)

‘There’s so much that needs forgiving.’

He nodded like a small boy doing what the nuns told him.
Salve regina, mater misericordiae,
she heard him slurring the words. Minutes passed.
O dulcis virgo Maria,
he murmured,
each word seeming to cost him more strength than he had. Then he must have fallen asleep. She felt relief, wanting only to think of Peter now. She really didn’t feel frightened any more. The
pillbox fell out of her hands. Shadows gathered round her and she could smell the blossoms in the Botanical Gardens back at home in Meran.

Alix

Pomerania, 2002

Minutes pass before anyone speaks. I shake my head. ‘So he told my mother then that it was Lena who informed on your mother?’

Gregor sighs. ‘Lena loved your mother more than anything else. It makes a kind of sense. I
did
believe Preizler back in 1945 when he insisted he hadn’t told the authorities
about Mami.’

I consider the main players in our story. Eight dancers facing each other in a quadrille: Gregor and I, Mami and Papi, Eva and Matthias, Lena and Preizler. But then there was that ninth
interloper: the man sometimes known as Vargá, sometimes as Vavilov. And now there’s Michael, too, only he isn’t an interloper at all but the key that makes sense of it all. While
I’ve been contemplating the reasons for Mami’s actions my son’s been coming to terms with the circumstances of his conception.

‘You told me back in London that I wasn’t the offspring of a . . . crime,’ he says. ‘But to meet my father, to see him with my own eyes and understand all that happened,
not just to you two but to your parents before you . . .’ His voice thickens. ‘It’s magic.’

Gregor’s sigh seems to fill the garden. ‘I’m glad you think that. I’ve been worried that some of the unhappiness of that winter night all those years ago might have
harmed you, might have made you hate me. I took advantage of your mother, after all.’

‘You didn’t take advantage of me,’ I say. ‘I was in love with you. Probably always had been since you kissed me in the cellar on my eleventh birthday. And I have my own
reasons for guilt.’

‘There is no guilt. I absolve you both,’ our son tells us. ‘I wipe out guilt and blame.’ He gives a throaty chuckle.

I’m about to say that it can’t be that simple, but find myself understanding that it can.

A breeze picks up, moving through the beeches and firs in the forest so that they dance and bow as though possessed by friendly spirits.

The sparrow finishes its work in the gravel and flies up into an acacia. Somewhere in the distance a dog howls. The world is ordinary and wonderful again.

Acknowledgements

My special thanks go to my editor Will Atkins for his wonderful work on this book. Thanks also to Christina Skarbek for her help with Polish expressions and family names.

As far as I know there is no von Matke family who ever lived in an eighteenth-century house called Alexanderhof near the town of Treptow (which does exist, now under the Polish name of
Trzebiatow). I have used accounts by Prussian families forced out of the area east of the Oder in the period 1945-7 to create the von Matkes.

The following books were particularly helpful when I was researching
Restitution:

Berlin,
Antony Beevor. The definitive account of the Soviet push for Berlin: harrowing and almost unbearably sad to read. I couldn’t have written much of the book without it.

The Ice Road,
Stefan W. Waydenfeld. An autobiographical account of a Polish professional family’s deportation to Siberia and subsequent journey across the Soviet Union to the
Caspian Sea and the freedom of British-administered Persia (Iran).

Gulag,
Anne Applebaum. A comprehensive examination of the savage Gulag system in the Soviet Union, which provided most of the details for Gregor’s time on the Magadan peninsula.

The Hidden Damage,
James Stern. An Anglo-American’s account of civilian life in Germany immediately after surrender.

The Past Is Myself; The Road Ahead,
Christabel Bielenberg. An Englishwoman’s life in Germany under Hitler and in the year just after the war ended.

The Berlin Diaries,
Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov. A White Russian’s life in Berlin, working for some of the conspirators behind the Bomb Plot.

Eliza Graham lives in the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire, with her husband, children and dogs.
Restitution
is her second novel.

Also by Eliza Graham

Playing with the Moon

First published 2008 by Macmillan New Writing

This electronic edition published 2010 by Macmillan New Writing
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