A Parachute in the Lime Tree (10 page)

That was when Elsa realised that Miss Jacob knew only as much as she wished to know. She longed to have someone to talk to. Even Lili, out on the Farm, would be better than no one at all. Her longing for a piano was stronger still.

That night, Elsa read all Mama’s letters. For the first time, she noticed that they always began the same way.

‘
My dear Elsa, I am so glad to hear that you thrive. We are fine here
.’ The first few letters were practically identical, in fact. Elsa began to read them more carefully, to see if she could find something true amongst the flowers and canals. The real Uncle Rudi, perhaps: the Uncle Rudi who had begrudged Elsa the daybed in the living room.

‘
I’d like to bake more, of course
,’ Mama had written, ‘
but I must remember that we are guests here. A guest, Elsa, must never be an inconvenience. She must echo the needs of her host and place her own desires second
.’

That night, Elsa resolved that she would not become Elsie. She would let them all know that she was Elsa, who belonged in Berlin with her own piano. Elsa, who liked to skate in winter and picnic in the Tiergarten when summer came. Elsa, who once had friends. One of the Thursday ladies must have a piano. She would find a piano. When she did, she would play
it so that they would, all of them, understand what it is to be a guest.

As the weeks went by, Elsa began to retreat into the past. Sometimes she thought of people who didn’t matter at all: Gerda and the other girls she used to meet for ice cream when that was still possible; her first teacher; even the composer Richard Strauss, a man she’d once seen descend on the Conservatoire like a great emperor on a State visit. What did the old man make of it all? She had met him on that visit to the Conservatoire. Professor Schwartzkopf had insisted that Elsa be the one to play for him, no matter what anybody said. Elsa took to picturing Strauss at home in Bavaria. She imagined a house with blown roses on the side wall. Did he ever wonder where people like Elsa had gone? Had he simply decided to ignore it all? Did he, perhaps, approve?

Mostly, she thought of Oskar. She wrote to him, picking her words carefully, trying not to sound disappointed in him. She didn’t rant, though she wanted to, though she wanted to scream it out, all down the page,
why don’t you care?
She didn’t send him love, either, because it was clear that was something he didn’t want. After all, she had received no reply to the letters she’d sent from Amsterdam.

In time, Elsa came to feel that Miss Jacob had tired of having her around the house. It seemed so easy to irritate her that Elsa began to stay out of her way. She stopped taking Elsa to the Thursday mannequin parades. ‘It’s not your place to be bothering people about the likes of pianos,’ she said. ‘There’s enough to be getting along with in this house without the playing of pianos.’

Not long afterwards, the woman who’d met Elsa from the boat visited the house. She talked in the same deliberate manner, as though speaking to a very young child or someone with only the most basic English.

‘It’s all right,’ Elsa told her, ‘I understand everything now.’

The woman looked a little puzzled at first, then hurt. Elsa wondered if it was just that she spoke to everyone like that.

‘There’s a bit more of a community in the Free State,’ the woman said. ‘Miss Jacob’s the best in the world but she’s getting on now. I’ve a family’s willing to take you in. You’d be better off with a family.’

And so Elsa moved on again, to Dublin.

Bethel Abrahamson was a tailor with his own business. His wife Hilde was from Manchester, which was where the couple had met, at the home of one of Bethel’s relatives. That was one of the first things Bethel told Elsa when he met her at Amiens Street. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck, Elsa. And in Manchester, into the bargain. There’s no telling where the finest flower may grow. Just remember that. It mightn’t look much to you, but who knows, Dublin might be the making of you.’

The family lived in a tight network of streets where everyone knew their neighbours; most families had come from a place called Lithuania half a century ago. The area was Portobello, which Bethel said meant Beautiful Harbour in Italian. It wasn’t so beautiful, really, but it did feel like somewhere she might tie up awhile. The Dublin people called it Little Jerusalem, Hilde said. Elsa wondered why it couldn’t just have its own name, instead of pretending to be somewhere else. There were bakeries where they sold things she’d not eaten since leaving Aunt Hanne. They even sold
hamantaschen
, with all kinds of fillings she’d not seen before. The canal that ran past the end of the street was like no Amsterdam canal, however. Its banks were a wild green jumble of nettles and long grass. It was a graveyard for old prams, and now and then a rat would plunge with a fat plop into the still water.

By the time she got to Dublin, Elsa had not played a piano for almost six months. While she’d continued to practise every day on the polished surface of Miss Jacob’s dining room table, the sound of the music in her head had grown fainter. It was becoming more difficult to hear the wrong notes, just as the faces of Mama, Papa, Oskar even, were becoming shadowier
too. It was in the comparisons between this new world and the old one that she sometimes remembered things she’d otherwise have forgotten.

In Berlin, the Frankels’
Havdalah
candlestick had been an exuberance of gold filigree with tiny jewels set into the knob on its spice drawer. The Abrahamsons had a small silver tower, simple and unadorned. The room they called the front parlour was overcrowded, every inch filled with furniture, china, bolts of cloth. In Zweibrückenstrasse, even the piano room was full of light, the floor a sea of gleaming oak, but that was before they closed the shutters.

The night she arrived, Hilde showed her into the back parlour where, it turned out, she spent most evenings embroidering the cloths that covered every surface in the front parlour where visitors were received. She’d hardly dared hope, let alone ask, but there was a piano. It was upright, of course (there was no room for anything else), with two brass candle sconces that splayed out on either side. It was heavy, too, carved deep with flowers. She sat down without even remembering to ask first. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, and then she played. It didn’t matter that the piano was out of tune. She played Chopin, even though she didn’t mean to: a nocturne.

The next night, the back parlour was filled to the brim with neighbours, come to hear the German girl play. The night after that, they filled the front parlour too. By the end of the week, Mr Kernoff from down the road had organised a collection for her. ‘That’s a talent can’t be wasted on the desert air,’ he said, and others agreed. They’d send her to the College of Music, get her lessons, give her a gift after all her troubles.

The Abrahamson girls, Lottie and Minnie, were ten and twelve. Shy at first, they sat with their arms round one another when Elsa was there, whispering and giggling. One day she walked into her room to find the younger one, Lottie, feeling the material in her blue silk dress where it hung in the closet,
wiping it slowly against her cheek. The girl jumped, blushed, then darted away. After that, she started to teach them some tunes on the piano and the ice was broken.

For a while, Elsa barely thought of Berlin. The little victories of Gerda and Marti no longer seemed to matter. When she wrote to Mama to tell her how happy she was, she didn’t have to resort to invention any more. However, Mama’s letters back did not change. She barely made reference to anything Elsa said. It was as though Mama’s letters had all been written at the same time and posted one by one.

Elsa never read newspapers, not even back home in Berlin. Although her English was almost fluent now, she didn’t start to read them when she came to Dublin either. The news on the wireless said little about the war on the continent, so she merely lived between the span of one day and the next, with her head full of notes. While the girls were at school, she helped Hilde with the housework, anxious not to make the same mistake as in Miss Jacob’s house. She became more adept even than Beate when it came to laundering, and the brass on the front door gleamed. When the work was done, she played Hilde’s piano – all afternoon sometimes – until it was time to prepare the vegetables for dinner. She didn’t go out much, except to lessons at the college. The Abrahamsons protected Elsa so effectively, that when Holland fell to the Germans it came as a complete shock.

Walking home from college, she saw the headline on a newsstand. At first, they tried to pretend that it wasn’t that bad. ‘Sure, this could be a grand time for them to make the move across,’ said Bethel.

But Hilde’s eyes had darkened and she avoided any mention of the war while Elsa was around. Often, when Bethel was out, they would sit in front of the fire together, each brushing the hair of one of the children, and Hilde would share some tittle-tattle she’d heard at the market on Camden Street.

When Elsa asked Bethel how she could find out more about what was happening at home, he said that the papers never said anything out straight. The best you could do was read between the lines. ‘Don’t fret now, if you hear nothing for a while. Try to live your life.’

That night, Elsa cried like she had not done since the ship left Holland. Hilde must have heard, because she came in and took Elsa in her arms and held her like a baby. She no longer played Chopin after that. Instead, she drilled herself with Bach Inventions, playing so fast she’d no time to feel anything but the keys. Sometimes she played for so long her back hurt.

She would never understand what had happened to Oskar. She hadn’t expected him to be so afraid, if that’s what it was, to be too cowardly to come to the house. Where was he now, she wondered? He must be in the war. Everyone was. She couldn’t imagine Oskar killing anything. He was always so very careful with spiders. It used to make her laugh, his elaborate efforts to trap them in one of the picnic cups, then fling them into the long grass. But even Oskar must be killing now. So many turnarounds, so many people who disappointed when it came to the bit.

She still wore the locket Mama had given her, pinned to the strap of her brassiere, smooth and cool as a pebble. One day, as she sat alone on a canal bench, she considered all the things that she had lost, even though she knew it wasn’t good to dwell on it. Her parents, her friends, the café by the lake, the shops on Ritterplatz, her beautiful baby Blüthner, the cat that used to sleep on the summerhouse roof. She wondered if she would ever see any of them again. And then there was Oskar. She remembered the last day she’d caught sight of him. He was wearing a new uniform and he passed, whistling, in front of the house without even turning his head. She unpinned the little silver locket and rolled it on the palm of her hand. Then, she opened it and let the wind take the strand of his hair.

Now that she could play the piano whenever she wanted, she was improving fast. Miss Joyce, her teacher at the college, displayed all her certificates on the wall above the piano as though they alone were proof that she knew best. For all her qualifications, Miss Joyce let Elsa sail through bars where Professor Schwarzkopf would have stopped her with a rap of a pencil or a sharp pinch on the shoulder. So Elsa became her own critic, stopping, recapitulating, while the new teacher sighed at such perfectionism.

As for the war, she learned that people preferred not to speak of it. Hilde looked uncomfortable when Elsa asked how long she thought it would last. People talked about the Emergency but they didn’t seem to approach it with any urgency that she could see. When one of Bethel’s sewing machines broke down, he sighed about the difficulty of getting hold of spare parts but that was all. The war seemed very far away.

Then, one January day, a stray German bomber flew over Dublin. Perhaps it got lost, perhaps not. It dropped two bombs as it passed over. One of them hit the synagogue in Donore Avenue, and for weeks afterwards people were in a state of panic. Mr Kernoff said it showed what they could do if they wanted to. Pin-point accuracy, was what it showed, he said. Other than that, the war might as well have been on another planet.

Miss Joyce suggested Elsa enter for a music festival whose name she could not decipher, other than that it began with an ‘F’. It would provide a focus, she said. She might polish up some of the old Berlin repertoire for it. If she wanted, she could try some more muscular music, a movement of a concerto even. Lottie sat for hours with her, page-turning and offering encouragement as she made her way through the work.

When the Feis arrived, she was amazed to see that people came to listen to the competitions as though they were a real concert. The hall was full when she arrived, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. All sorts of people were there;
elderly ladies with knitting, men leaning against the wall at the back as though they were just passing through and would soon be off again. A singing class preceded her own. Tenors. There was a minister of religion who sang with his hands clasped girlishly, a florid-faced man who looked as old as Bethel, a young man with a face like a ripe peach.

She hadn’t played on a stage in so long she wasn’t sure how it would feel, but when her turn came she recognised the sensation of losing her hearing, of somehow drifting to the stage, of producing music she could not remember having learned.

‘Once you have thoroughly mastered a piece,’ Professor Schwartzkopf had told her, ‘you must lose all self-consciousness and let the music play for you.’