Life After Life (40 page)

(‘They’re not really
factories
, you know,’ Pamela wrote.)

Ursula remembered being an avid reader of fairy tales as a child. She had put great faith not so much in the happy ending as in the restoration of justice to the world. She suspected she had been duped by
die Brüder
Grimm.
Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?
Not this lot, that was for sure, Ursula thought, looking around the Great Hall during her first wearisome evening on the Berg.

The Führer was a man who preferred operetta to opera, cartoons to highbrow culture. Watching him holding Eva’s hand while humming along to Lehar, Ursula was struck by how
ordinary
(even silly) he was, more Mickey Mouse than Siegfried. Sylvie would have made short work of him. Izzie would have eaten him up and spat him out. Mrs Glover – what would Mrs Glover have done, Ursula wondered? This was her new favourite game, deciding how the people she knew would have dealt with the Nazi oligarchs. Mrs Glover, she concluded, would probably have beaten them all soundly with her meat hammer. (What would Bridget do? Ignore him completely probably.)

When the film was finished the Führer settled down to expound (for hours) on his pet subjects – German art and architecture (he perceived himself to be an architect-manqué),
Blut und Boden
(the land, always the land), his solitary, noble path (the wolf again). He was the saviour of Germany, and poor Germany, his
Schneewittchen
, would be saved by him whether she wanted it or not. He droned on about healthy German art and music, about Wagner,
Die Meistersinger
, his favourite line from the libretto –
Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag
– ‘Awake, the morning is here’ (it would be if he went on much longer, she thought). Back to destiny – his – how it was intertwined with the destiny of the
Volk
.
Heimat, Boden
, victory or downfall (What victory, Ursula wondered? Against whom?). Then something about Frederick the Great that she didn’t catch, something about Roman architecture, then the Fatherland. (For the Russians it was ‘the Motherland’, was there something to be made of that, Ursula wondered? What was it for the English? Just ‘England’, she supposed. Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ at a pinch.)

Then back to destiny and the
Tausendjähriges
. On and on so that the headache that had begun before dinner as a dull ache was a crown of thorns by now. She imagined Hugh saying, ‘Oh, do shut up, Herr Hitler,’ and suddenly felt so homesick she thought she was going to cry.

She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner.

As with kings and their courtiers, they could not leave until dismissed, until the monarch himself decided to ascend to the bedchamber. At one point Ursula caught Eva yawning theatrically at him as if to say, ‘That’s enough now, Wolfi’ (her imagination was becoming rather lurid, she knew, forgivable given the circumstances). And then at last, finally, thank God, he made a move and the exhausted company rustled to its feet.

Women in particular seemed to love the Führer. They wrote him letters in the thousands, baked him cakes, embroidered swastikas on to cushions and pillows for him, and, like Hilde and Hanne’s BDM troop, lined the steep road up to the Obersalzberg to catch a delirious glimpse of him in the big black Mercedes. Many women shouted to him that they wanted to have his baby. ‘But what do they
see
in him?’ Sylvie puzzled. Ursula had taken her to a parade, one of the interminable flag-waving, banner-toting ones in Berlin, because she wanted to ‘find out for myself what all the fuss is about’. (How very British of Sylvie to reduce the Third Reich to a ‘fuss’.)

The street was a forest of red, black and white. ‘Their colours are very harsh,’ Sylvie said, as though she were considering asking the National Socialists to decorate her living room.

At the Führer’s approach the crowd’s excitement had grown to a rabid frenzy of
Sieg Heil
and
Heil Hitler
. ‘Am I the only one to be unmoved?’ Sylvie said. ‘What is it, do you suppose – mass hysteria of some kind?’

‘I know,’ Ursula said, ‘it’s like the Emperor’s new clothes. We’re the only ones who can see the naked man.’

‘He’s a clown,’ Sylvie said dismissively.

‘Shush,’ Ursula said. The English word was the same as the German and she didn’t want to attract the hostility of the people around them. ‘You should put your arm up,’ she said.

‘Me?’ the outraged flower of British womanhood replied.

‘Yes, you.’

Reluctantly, Sylvie raised her arm. Ursula thought that until the day she died she would remember the sight of her mother giving the Nazi salute. Of course, Ursula said to herself afterwards, this was in ’34, back when one’s conscience hadn’t been shrunk and muddled by fear, when she had been blind to what was truly afoot. Blinded by love perhaps, or just dumb stupidity. (Pamela had seen, unblinkered by anything.)

Sylvie had made the journey to Germany so that she could inspect Ursula’s unexpected husband. Ursula wondered what she had planned to do if she hadn’t found Jürgen suitable – drug and kidnap her and haul her on to the
Schnellzug
? They were still in Munich then, Jürgen hadn’t started working for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, they hadn’t moved to the Savignyplatz or become parents to Frieda, although Ursula was cumbersome with pregnancy.

‘Fancy you becoming a mother,’ Sylvie said, as if it were something she had never expected. ‘To a German,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘To a baby,’ Ursula said.

‘It’s nice to get away,’ Sylvie said. From what, Ursula wondered?

Klara met them for lunch one day and afterwards said, ‘Your mother is rather chic.’ Ursula had never thought of Sylvie as stylish but she supposed that compared with Klara’s mother, Frau Brenner, as soft and doughy as a loaf of
Kartoffelbrot
, Sylvie was quite a fashion plate.

On the way back from lunch, Sylvie said she wanted to visit Oberpollingers and buy a present for Hugh. When they reached the department store they found the windows daubed with anti-Jewish slogans and Sylvie said, ‘Gracious, what a mess.’ The shop was open for business but a pair of grinning louts in SA uniform were loitering in front of the doors, putting people off from entering. Not Sylvie, who had marched past the Brownshirts while Ursula reluctantly trailed in her wake into the store and up the thickly carpeted staircase. In the face of the uniforms, Ursula had shrugged a cartoon helplessness and murmured rather shamefacedly, ‘She’s English.’ She thought that Sylvie didn’t understand what it was like living in Germany but in retrospect she thought that perhaps Sylvie had understood very well.

‘Ah, here’s lunch,’ Eva said, putting down the camera and taking Frieda’s hand. She led her to the table and then propped her up on an extra cushion before heaping her plate with food. Chicken, roast potatoes and a salad, all from the Gutshof. How well they ate here.
Milchreis
for Frieda’s pudding, the milk fresh that morning from the cows of the Gutshof. (A less childish
Käsekuchen
for Ursula, a cigarette for Eva.) Ursula remembered Mrs Glover’s rice pudding, a creamy, sticky yellow beneath its crisp brown skin. She could smell the nutmeg even though she knew there was none in Frieda’s dish. She couldn’t remember the German for nutmeg and thought it was too difficult to explain to Eva. The food was the only thing that she was going to miss about the Berghof so she might as well enjoy it while she could, she thought, and helped herself to more
Käsekuchen
.

Lunch was served to them by a small contingent of the army of staff who serviced the Berghof. The Berg was a curious combination of Alpine holiday chalet and military training camp. A small town really with a school, a post office, a theatre, a large SS barracks, a rifle range, a bowling alley, a Wehrmacht hospital and much more, everything but a church really. There were also plenty of young, handsome Wehrmacht officers who would have made better suitors for Eva.

After lunch they walked up to the
Teehaus
on the Mooslahner Kopf, Eva’s yappy, nippy dogs running along beside them. (If only one of them would fall off the parapet or from the outlook.) Ursula had the beginnings of a headache and sank gratefully into one of the armchairs with green-flowered linen upholstery that she found particularly offensive to the eye. Tea – and cake, naturally – were brought to them from the kitchen. Ursula swallowed a couple of codeine with her tea and said, ‘I think Frieda’s well enough to go home now.’

Ursula went to bed as early as she could, slipping in between the cool white sheets of the guest-room bed she shared with Frieda. Too tired to sleep, she found herself still awake at two in the morning so she put on the bedside light – Frieda slept the deep sleep of children, only illness could wake her – and she got out pen and paper and wrote to Pamela instead.

Of course, none of these letters to Pamela was ever posted. She couldn’t be completely sure that they wouldn’t be read by someone. You just didn’t
know
, that was the awful thing (how much more awful for others). Now she wished they weren’t in the dog-days of heat when the
Kachelofen
in the guest room was cold and unlit, as it would have been safer to burn the correspondence. Safer never to have written at all. One could no longer express one’s true thoughts.
Truth is truth to the end of reckoning
. What was that from?
Measure for Measure
? But perhaps truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful
lot
of reckoning when the time came.

She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner. She had planned to go back in May but then Frieda had become sick. She’d had it all planned, their suitcases were packed, stored beneath the bed, where they were usually kept empty so Jürgen had no reason to look inside them. She had the train tickets, the onward boat-train tickets, had told no one, not even Klara. She hadn’t wanted to move their passports – Frieda’s luckily still valid from their trip to England in ’35 – from the big porcupine-quill box where all their documents were kept. She had checked they were there almost every day but then the day before they were to go she looked in the box and there was no sign of them. She thought she was mistaken, rifled through birth and death and marriage certificates, through insurance and guarantees, Jürgen’s will (he was a lawyer, after all), all kinds of paperwork except for what mattered. In mounting panic she emptied the lot on to the carpet and went through everything one by one, again and again. No passports, only Jürgen’s. In desperation she went through every drawer in the house, searched inside every shoebox and cupboard, beneath sofa cushions and mattresses. Nothing.

They ate supper as normal. She could barely swallow. ‘Are you feeling ill?’ Jürgen asked, solicitously.

‘No,’ she said. Her voice sounded squeaky. What could she say? He knew, of course, he knew.

‘I thought we might take a holiday,’ he said. ‘On Sylt.’

‘Sylt?’

‘Sylt. We won’t need a passport for there,’ he said. Did he smile? Did he? And then Frieda was ill and nothing else mattered.

‘
Er kommt!
’ Eva said happily the next morning at breakfast. The Führer was coming.

‘When? Now?’

‘No, this afternoon.’

‘What a shame, we’ll be gone by then,’ Ursula said. Thank God, she thought. ‘Do thank him, won’t you?’

They were taken home in one of the fleet of black Mercedes from the
Platterhof
garage, driven by the same chauffeur who had brought them to the Berghof.

The next day Germany invaded Poland.

April 1945

THEY HAD LIVED for months in the cellar, like rats. When the British were bombing by day and the Americans by night there was nothing else for it. The cellar beneath the apartment block in the Savignyplatz was dank and disgusting, a small paraffin lamp for light and one bucket for a lavatory, yet the cellar was better than one of the bunkers in town. She had been caught with Frieda near the zoo in a daylight raid and had taken shelter in the Zoo Station flak tower – thousands of people crammed in, the air supply gauged by a candle (as if they were canaries). If the candle goes out, someone told her, everyone has to leave, out into the open even if a raid is in progress. Near to where they were crushed against a wall, a man and a woman were embracing (a polite term for what they were doing) and as they were leaving they had to step over an old man who had died during the raid. The worst thing, even worse than this, was that as well as being a shelter the enormous concrete citadel was a gigantic anti-aircraft battery, several huge guns pounding away on the roof the whole time so that the shelter shook with every recoil. It was the closest to hell that Ursula ever hoped to come.

An enormous explosion had shaken the structure, a bomb dropped close to the zoo. She felt the pressure wave sucking and pushing her body and was terrified that Frieda’s lungs might burst. It passed. Several people vomited, although unfortunately there was nowhere to vomit except on one’s feet, or perhaps worse, on other people’s feet. Ursula vowed never to go into a flak tower again. She would rather, she thought, die out in the street, quickly, with Frieda. That’s what she thought about a lot of the time now. A swift, clean death, Frieda wrapped in her arms.

Perhaps it was Teddy up there, dropping bombs on them. She hoped it was, it would mean he was alive. There had been a knock on the door one day – when they still had a door, before the British started their relentless bombing in November ’43. When Ursula opened the door she found a thin youth standing there, fifteen or sixteen years old maybe. He had a desperate air and Ursula wondered if he was looking for somewhere to hide but he pushed an envelope into her hand and ran off before she could even say a word to him.

The envelope was creased and filthy. Her name and address were written on it and she burst into tears at the sight of Pamela’s handwriting. Thin papery blue sheets, dated several weeks ago, detailing all the comings and goings of her family – Jimmy in the army, Sylvie fighting the good fight on the home front (‘a new weapon – chickens!’). Pamela was well and living at Fox Corner, she said, four boys now. Teddy in the RAF, a squadron leader with a DFC. A lovely long letter and at the end a page that was almost like a postscript, ‘I have saved the sad news to last.’ Hugh was dead. ‘In the autumn of 1940, peacefully, a heart attack.’ Ursula wished she hadn’t received the letter, wished she could think of Hugh still alive, of Teddy and Jimmy in non-combatant roles, living out the war in a coal mine or civil defence.