A Parachute in the Lime Tree (26 page)

The kids were Frankel-Byrnes: their choice, not hers. In her late teens, Maya had stood at the door of the kitchen, her hands on her hips, and announced that she wanted to go to synagogue. ‘You can’t stop me from being what I am.’

Charlie wasn’t keen on any religion but he said nothing. As for Elsa herself, though she found it too painful to be Jewish in New York, let alone admit she was from Berlin and ally herself with the wounded and the lost, she was glad, too, that the thread had not been broken. If Maya was willing to take it on, well and good. For Elsa, it was just too hard.

She looks at the name. Elsa Frankel. She traces the curved lines of the handwriting with her fingertip. She can’t imagine why she should suddenly be Elsa Frankel again. Not now, at nearly seventy-eight.

The letter is in German. She reads the opening line and at once she knows who this is. The day slips away from her, and the place, and she is back in Berlin with Oskar, as though the entire life she has lived as Elsa Byrne suddenly belongs to someone else. When she looks up, Carmela is standing over her. She is saying something about a sandwich. She recites a list of ingredients: pastrami, cheese, tuna. She talks of a little salad, maybe, if Mrs Byrne would like. But the voice in the letter is more urgent than anything Carmela has to say. Meanwhile, Sebastian has started to play the Field. It is the wrong moment for Field, and she tells him to stop. Something in her voice must have startled him. He gets up from the piano and moves towards her. ‘You okay, Bubbe?’ he said. ‘You sure?’

She tries to keep her voice steady. ‘Try the Chopin instead,’ she says. ‘The B flat minor. Play that.’

My dearest Elsa
, the letter begins,
I have always loved you
.

While she could read the letter well enough without them, she pulls up her glasses from the chain around her neck and puts them on to hold back her tears. She reads it through, and then again, and each time more and more of it returns to her. The woods? She remembers the woods, the lake, all of it. She’d been no more than Sebastian’s age when she and Oskar fell in love. She would practise for hours at the open window of the house in Zweibruckenstrasse, the music wafting over all the
neighbourhood gardens that stretched right down to the tall screen of chestnut trees. How she’d loved that garden: the pale pink roses on the wall that divided them from the Müllers, the old swing, the summerhouse where Papa would drive Mama crazy with his paint spatters all over the floor. Mama and Papa. She couldn’t bear to think of them. Theresienstadt, and then what? Charlie had spent years trying to find out what had happened to everyone but in the end she’d asked not to hear any more.

Through her tears, she can see that Sebastian isn’t really playing any more; he’s just limping through the piece while he watches her over his shoulder. Next thing, he’s beside her, his arms around her. She relaxes against him. It’s been so long since anyone has really held her. She tries to tell him not to worry but Carmela is there with a phone in her hand, saying something about a doctor. Sebastian picks up Oskar’s envelope gingerly and examines it as if it’s a suspect device. She puts her hand on his. ‘It’s alright, my darling,’ she says. ‘I’m not ill, and it’s not bad news. Sometimes, we cry because we are too happy to laugh.’

He doesn’t look like he entirely believes her, though he probably wants to. It takes a while to persuade them both to leave her, that she’ll be fine on her own.

‘Come back tomorrow, Sebastian,’ she says. ‘And we’ll finish the rest. I just need some time to think. Your Chopin was too moving, you see.’ She laughs a little, and so does he. ‘Don’t say anything to Mama, now, will you? There’s no need for her to worry.’

Finally, they shut the door of the apartment behind them, and Elsa listens to the silence, until she realises that it isn’t really a silence at all. There is the carriage clock on her desk, the longcase in the hallway, the silly ormolu frou-frou thing on the sideboard. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Before today, it hadn’t bothered her too much that time was running out. Now, everything is
urgent. Suddenly, there is so much to fit in. The thought that something might happen to prevent her seeing Oskar makes her heart gallop so fast she can hardly breathe.

She’s been so distracted by the letter that she hasn’t even looked to see what else is in the envelope: two audio tapes, strapped together with a rubber band and a yellow Post-it note.

‘My story, Elsa, is in these. Our story, too, I suppose, or part of it. My granddaughter’s ingenuity didn’t stretch as far as your telephone number, so I have given you mine. I don’t expect anything, but I hope this makes a difference.’

She panics for a moment when she realises she’s thrown out the old tape deck. Then she remembers the Walkman that James gave her while she was recovering from pneumonia. She finds the right size of batteries in a kitchen drawer. Her fingers clumsy with anticipation, she slots them in. Before she presses the button, she takes a moment to look out over the park at the view that has been hers for nearly all her marriage, certain it will never be quite the same view again. Then, she puts on the headphones and waits.

It is astonishing to hear his voice. She can’t remember how he sounded when young but there’s something in the rhythm of his speech that seems familiar, and when he takes a breath or swallows, she feels it in her head, as though the story he tells is something she has always known but had somehow lost the ability to hear. When the story has been told, she cries. Not because she married Charlie. She loved Charlie: they were happy and it had helped that New York was a third place, new to both of them. She cries with the relief of knowing that she wasn’t wrong about Oskar. It’s a small thing, in the great landscape of betrayal that was Berlin all those years ago. But it’s something true, and that matters.

While she’s been listening to Oskar, the day has dropped slowly down the sky. The trees are growing blacker as the sky deepens and reddens over at the far fringes of the park. The
day will soon be gone, just as, soon enough, the old century will be gone too. She wonders when Maya will ring, because she knows Sebastian won’t be able to keep this to himself. There will be a phone call and then there will be explanations required. How can she tell Maya about any of this? What could she say that would make any sense at all?

Far below, a long stream of traffic snarls and snakes around the edges of the park. She goes into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. As she waits for the kettle to boil, she struggles to recall his face, then catches her own reflection in the oven glass. They would both look so different now. They are not the same people any more. Not a single molecule of either of them remains from back then. And yet. She goes over to the piano and adjusts the stool. She still plays most days, but never Chopin.

She tries the melody on its own at first. After only a couple of bars, it gives her the answer, as she knew it would. It’s nearly nightfall when she lifts the phone.

Thanks to the ZenAzzurri writers, past and present; Anne Aylor, Susan Clegg, Anita Dawood, Gavin Eyers, Aimee Hansen, Richard Hughes, Margaret Laing, Roger Levy, Steve Mullins, Sally Ratcliffe, Richard Simmons, and Elise Valmorbida. I am particularly grateful to Elise, who gave generously of her outstanding gifts – I was fortunate to have such a reader.

Thanks also to Lynn Foote, Vicky Grut, Aoi Matsushima, Kathy Page, Dallas Sealy and Novelette Stewart for their valuable input on an early draft.

I am indebted to Alan Scheckenbach, who answered some of my questions via the Luftwaffe Discussion Board and conducted an interview on my behalf with Erich Sommer, since deceased, a former member of a KGr100 crew based in Vannes.

I am also grateful to the late Margarete Fleischmann McCann whose husband, George Fleischmann, was interned in G-Camp at the Curragh and who was generous enough to lend me her only copy of his memoir, allowing it to leave Canada temporarily despite never having met me. Also, to Noel Mulvihill, who put me in touch with Margarete.

Thanks to the staff of the library of the Imperial War Museum in London for their tremendous help; to the Irish Jewish Museum, a unique window on a vanished way of life in Portobello; to the British Library newspaper archive and the London Library.

A few words about music: the piece Elsa plays at the Feis Ceoil, and again at the end of the book, is Chopin’s
Nocturne in D flat Major Op. 27, No 2
; the song Charlie hears as he walks down Stamer Street is ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls’ from
The Bohemian Girl
by Michael William Balfe; the medley Elsa plays
after the Shabbat dinner is from Franz Léhar’s operetta,
Das Land des Lächelns
(The Land of Smiles); and the tune Charlie recognises is ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’. The best-known recordings of John Field’s fifteen sublime Nocturnes are by John O’Conor and Miceál O’Rourke.

One of the seeds for this book was a face in a photograph of a group of pupils at the Read School of Pianoforte in Dublin, which my aunt Nuala attended in the late 1930s. Nuala remembered the girl as a German Jewish exile and brilliant pianist and somehow, years later, she became the inspiration for Elsa.

I would like to express my gratitude to Listowel Writers’ Week for awarding
Guest
the 2009 Bryan MacMahon short story award, and to Helen Carey who republished it in the brochure for that year’s TULCA visual arts festival; also to Fish Publishing for awarding
Painting over Elsa
a prize in the 2009 short story competition.

Many thanks to Ronan Colgan of The History Press Ireland, and to Beth Amphlett and Maeve Convery.

Finally, the greatest thanks of all to my mother and late father, to Mike for his love and patience, and to my wonderful sons – Patrick, Conor and Rory.

First published in 2012

The History Press Ireland

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Ireland

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This ebook edition first published in 2012

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© Annemarie Neary, 2012

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MOBI ISBN
978 0 7524 8064 0

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