A Parachute in the Lime Tree (9 page)

Downstairs, Mama was selecting some volumes of Schiller from the bookcase for Papa. Elsa stood in front of the mantel-piece, as if trying to decide which photograph she couldn’t
bear to leave behind. Finally, she chose a photograph of her great-grandparents, surrounded by all seven of their sons, and left it on the hall table. Great Grandpapa was sitting open mouthed, a black slick of hair across his forehead. Great Grandmama looked like a stuffed doll, with fierce little eyes and a large hat.

It wasn’t until they were on the train that Elsa realised she’d forgotten to pack the photograph. She had pinned the amulet to her underclothes but her great grandparents had been left all alone on the hall table. She felt ashamed to have remembered Oskar when her own people had been left behind.

From the moment they arrived in Amsterdam, the Frankels took up too much space. Mama seemed too wide for the narrow hallway and Elsa’s limbs too unruly with so much china about. Aunt Hanne lost no time in getting everyone organised. She had lots of very neat friends with scrubbed faces and weak smiles: friends who knew things. In no time at all, one of these brought news of the Kindertransports. It seemed Elsa was still young enough to qualify as a
Kind
even though she was almost eighteen and had been wearing foundation garments for three years at least. Elsa would go to Belfast.

One evening, they all sat around the atlas. They looked for Belfast on the map of England. Elsa had never heard of Belfast before: no composer, no performer, not even a conservatoire. Mama drew a spiral around London with her finger then ran it up the coast to Scotland. It was a while before they realised that Belfast was not in England at all.

‘So, Ireland then.’ Elsa must have looked blank.

‘Come on Elsa, it’s just the next island along. The last one before America.’

Aunt Hanne’s friend explained that, though it was Ireland, it was a part that England still owned. Elsa was lucky, she said. There was lots of open space in Ireland to grow good wholesome food. As for music, many people had a piano in the house. It should not be impossible for Elsa to keep up her music.

The day of the journey was one of scuffed goodbyes. Aunt Hanne said she wouldn’t be coming along to the port. ‘You mustn’t take offence,’ she told Elsa. ‘It’s just there’ve been so many, that’s all.’ Papa was unwell again. There was dread in his eyes but he seemed unable to express it. He got out of bed but
Mama decided it would all be too much for him and sent him right back again. He clutched Elsa’s hand a moment, then slowly shook his head and walked away. As for Mama, she talked all the way to Rotterdam. Aunt Hanne had told her about the wedding of a distant cousin whom neither of them had ever met. Now, Mama discussed it as though she had seen it all with her own eyes: the Bruges lace in the girl’s dress, her shell-pink roses. Uncle Rudi said not a word, his eyes fixed firmly on the road.

Later, Elsa sat next to the porthole. She rubbed at the glass with her sleeve to see out better but the haze and grime seemed to be on the outside. She imagined them on the quayside, their eyes straining in the morning glare then settling on someone in the same shade of blue. Nearby sat a girl of ten or so in a crinkly dress. She was sobbing, crunched up like a bonbon in its wrapper. For fear of being infected with such hopelessness, Elsa turned her back. When she could stand it no more she went up on deck but the girl’s misery followed her like a fog. She knew she should have offered some comfort but somehow she was unable.

As she watched the flat coast slip under the horizon she began to cry herself and once she started, the tears tripped over one another. She tried to be quiet, to avoid setting anyone else off. She kept her shoulders set firm as a rack but soon she was howling into the North Sea. She leaned over the rails and shook her face back and forward into the sharp sea wind, tears smarting on her cheeks. When she had cried herself out, she walked along the deck, and there she noticed others, wailing just as she had done. Some were no more than babies. One tiny boy sat with his face pressed into the barrier, his thin arm reaching for the retreating coast. ‘Mama,’ he kept shouting. ‘Mama.’ Elsa tried to touch his shoulder but he pushed himself further into the rails and so she let him be.

In her head were girls who hadn’t crossed her mind since the day she left school in Berlin. She could see her old classroom,
that haze of heads in the rows in front of her, blonde and off-blonde. Gerda must be an accompanist all the time now. She’d be pleased with that. Even Marti can’t have been too sad. Marti, with her loose blonde curls and her way of laughing with her teeth joined perfectly together.

‘After all,’ Mama said once, ‘her father’s made a fortune out of the boycott. They’re doing well now. You can’t expect Marti to be sorry things are as they are.’

The arrival at England took her by surprise. When she awoke, children were crowding around each porthole, the little ones hopping up on tippy toes to see better. When they docked at Harwich, there were lots of people, bright flashes. They seemed welcome.

‘Here, Miss. A little smile for England. And again. Come on, little lad. Lift teddy up. Show him the camera.’

Elsa caught sight of the little boy she’d noticed on deck the night before. He came and sat next to her. Silently, he slid his hand into hers. When the women with papers came to divide the children into groups, they seemed confused by Elsa and the little boy. They conferred in whispers. Eventually, someone gently prised the little boy’s hand out of Elsa’s. He went off with a woman whose hat had cherries on the brim. He didn’t cry but his eyes stayed on Elsa until he was out of sight.

A train ride the width of the country. All the way to Liverpool with just sugar-pink Lili for company. The mail boat to Belfast smelt of vomit and tobacco and there were so few other women or girls that Lili and Elsa curled up together on deck, shivering in the rain and spray. By the time the boat docked, they were exhausted. The woman who met them on the quayside drew her hands over her mouth in a pleased little peak and called them darlings. She placed a hand on Lili’s wavy hair, picked lint off Elsa’s coat. Her dress was old fashioned, Elsa noticed, and she spoke with great articulation. Each movement of her mouth was exaggerated, allowing a thorough
display of her large teeth. The woman explained that, normally, they’d both be going out to the Farm. Lili, she said, would still be going there.

‘I’m sure, Lili, you’ll love farm life. We’ll have you milking in no time.’

Lili looked horrified.

‘Elsa, you, being just a wee bit older, are going Elsewhere.’

There were some, the woman murmured, half to herself, said so what if she’s a bit older … she’d be better off at the Farm … fresh air … exercise … a tonic for lungs half starved in city air. The Farm sounded trying, Elsa decided, and she was glad to be going Elsewhere. Elsa was to be placed with a spinster in the east of the city, a Miss Jacob.

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘Not as far as I know. No piano.’

It was a short drive from the port to the stolid reddish house that stood back from a long tree-lined avenue. Elsa gathered that, having the means and the space and being Jewish herself, Miss Jacob had been prevailed upon to take her in. A woman whose face seemed to sink into her chin, Miss Jacob showed little interest in what life had been like for Elsa. ‘A bad business,’ was all she said.

Every day, a lady came to polish and shine, jiggling like a jelly as she worked. At first, Elsa thought the woman might have a persistent cold, she seemed to sniff so much. Then, she came to imagine disapproval in those sniffs. One day, Elsa stood at the cupboard full of cleaning substances and tried to work out what each was for. She tried to remember what Beate used to do back home in Berlin before deciding she need no longer take orders from Mama.

Elsa adopted the cleaning of the brass on the front door and the broad plate that splayed over the threshold. Each morning she would stand there, clutching at the doorknob with a soft cloth, rubbing a little, watching the distortion of her own
reflected face. This position, half in and half out of Miss Jacob’s house, seemed to suit her. She was always first to see the postman, a little man with two stripes of hair plastered over his pate.

Mama’s letters from Amsterdam were written in tiny handwriting on fragile paper. She talked of the weather, the flowers in Aunt Hanne’s window boxes, Papa’s bronchitis. Uncle Rudi played chess with Papa, she said. Elsa wondered if he let Uncle Rudi win.

‘Papa is very hopeful that soon we will follow you to Ireland,’ she wrote. ‘Our application should be considered presently.’

Later, she stopped mentioning the visa application. Instead, she wrote about the canals, the pretty houses and Aunt Hanne’s talent for homemaking. She mentioned no feelings of her own. There was never a word of Berlin.

When she wrote back, Elsa invented a beautiful Bechstein. In her letters, Miss Jacob was only a few years older than Elsa, a musician as well. She had glamorous friends who danced and told wonderful stories. Together they went to the theatre. The weather was not good; that much she admitted. No skating, of course. But the music, the piano. The opportunities she had to practise, to accompany Miss Jacob on the violin. She was building herself up, getting stronger. Soon she would be able to try more muscular music. Maybe, one day soon, her first concerto.

Meanwhile, life went on without music. On Thursdays, Miss Jacob and Elsa were driven into the centre of Belfast to a room of gilt and mirrors where elderly women in hats took afternoon tea, their chicken necks choked with pearls. The ladies would make polite enquiries as to the state of knees and hips before a hush fell on the room in readiness for the entry of the mannequins. On Elsa’s first visit, the ladies ignored her, save for an occasional nod. She overheard one of them ask Miss Jacob who her wee guest was.

‘That’s my refugee,’ Miss Jacob corrected her, and then a mannequin swept past the table and no more was said. Elsa felt
their eyes on her and after that she was never quite sure how a refugee was supposed to behave.

A month without a piano and Elsa’s head was so full of notes she felt it might burst. Her fingers ached for the cool precision of the piano keys. The only music in Miss Jacob’s house was the ticking of the many clocks. They made time stretch through being so marked. Elsa took to sitting at the polished table in the empty dining room. She would sit there for hours with her eyes closed, playing things like the
Kinderstücke
, little pieces that required no concentration she knew them so well.

Her fingers flew across the table or sang out a melody or plunged deep chords into its surface until it seemed as though the wood itself began to yield, as though there was some faint reply from the living tree it had once been. Before long, she could tell immediately that she’d played a wrong note, hear that a thumb was thudding in among the runs of notes.

For all that, she found that she couldn’t play her favourite things. A single phrase of Chopin tore into her heart like a ripcord. It made the walls of the little room dissolve and the music slide away from her. It made her see the world from high above her own head. Beneath her was this windy island, the grey corner into which she’d been tucked. Far over to her right was Berlin, where Marti and Gerda would be at the lake or having dancing classes with Herr Schreiber, whose hair gleamed like black satin. Somewhere in between was Amsterdam, flat on its back against the sea. This view of far-distant things brought too much pain and so she avoided Chopin. Her practice finished, she would take a soft cloth from the kitchen and wipe away the music from the surface of the table.

One Thursday, as Elsa was returning from the Ladies’ Powder Room, just before the mannequin parade, she overheard Miss Jacob mention her name.

‘You see, she’s been spoilt rotten. Doesn’t lift a hand. You do something out of the kindness of your heart and you get
nothing back. Hours she spends, sitting in the dining room. I know, now, she’s had it hard but you’d think the girl could show some gratitude. If you ask me, a guest should behave like one.’

A few days later, war broke out. Everywhere, the news-paper boys were yodelling about it. Miss Jacob and the ladies at the mannequin parade seemed amazed by the depth of Elsa’s shock. While they were kind enough and kept refilling her cup with the dark orange tea they all drank, she saw them exchange glances when she muttered that she’d never really believed that this would happen. Miss Trimble placed her hand on Elsa’s and told her not to worry. ‘There’s no war in Amsterdam, love,’ she said. ‘They’ll be right as rain over there.’

One of the other women said it might do no harm to blend in a bit. Become Elsie, maybe, rather than Elsa.

The next morning it was raining when Elsa left the house to collect Miss Jacob’s pineapple creams from the baker’s shop at the end of the road. Each day since war broke out, she’d written a letter to Mama without knowing if it would ever arrive, though the little postman assured her that, ‘So far, now, neutral places is fine.’ She was clutching the latest in her hand, had barely strayed beyond the garden gate, when she heard the ping of something hard against the railings beside her. A sharp stone hit her in the calf and she gasped and jumped to one side. There were just two of them; little boys, no more than seven or eight, tongues out, thumbs waggling from their ears, shouting nonsense as incomprehensible as the newspaper boys on every corner. Then they started goose-stepping towards her, their fingers laid under their noses, their right hands jutting up in front of them.

At first, she couldn’t believe that this was meant for her but soon realisation streamed across her mind like ink. The children were right up beside her now, their faces scrunched up into ugly little balls. She opened her mouth to scream at them but no sound would come. Sensing her defeat, they stepped
up their insults. They walked round and round her but she’d plugged her ears against them. They came closer still, circling around her, dancing their war dance. One of them took a sharp pebble from his pocket and skimmed it towards her but this time it just glanced off the toe of her shoe. They seemed to lose interest then. Without another word, they ran off in the direction of the shop. When they were gone, she found she was crying and that seemed more shameful than anything else. In her head, she saw Papa with his head bowed and spit down the back of his coat. When she went back to the house, Miss Jacob was waiting at the door. ‘Come in out of that, child.’ She must have seen the tears but she said nothing.