Magnolia Square (42 page)

‘Wanna smoke?’ the GI proffered, shaking open a packet of cigarettes.

Christina shook her head. In the rest of the railway carriage a dozen pairs of eyes, naked with longing, watched as he slipped the packet back into the top pocket of his Army jacket. Her head
ached. She had known her journey was going to be traumatic, but already, even before they had reached Cologne, it was painful almost beyond bearing. Everywhere she looked there was not only
devastation, there was hunger. On crowded railway platforms, weary women with skinny arms and gaunt faces clutched hold of hollow-cheeked children and pathetic bundles of belongings. London and
Londoners had suffered in the war but, heavily rationed though they had been, they had not suffered the kind of hunger the people now crammed into the railway carriage with her were suffering. Slim
and petite as she was, in contrast to them Christina felt overweight and indecently overfed.

‘
Köln!
’ a railway guard shouted through the carriages. ‘
Bitte aussteigen!
’

Köln
not Cologne.
Bitte
, not please.
Aussteigen
, not ‘Please prepare to leave the train.’ The familiar language reverberated against her ears like waves on
a beach. Because it was the language of Nazis, she had, for all the years she had lived in London, barely even thought in it, much less spoken it. Yet the language was her language as well. It was
part of her heritage, just as Yiddish was part of it; just as the English her Bermondsey-born grandmother had taught her from her cradle, was part of it.

As all around her people gathered pathetically shabby suitcases and shawl-wrapped bundles, Christina stared out of the grimy windows at a city so destroyed by bombing it seemed impossible that
train tracks should still be running into it.

‘We’re here,’ Miss Marshall said unnecessarily. ‘Are you quite sure you’re going to be all right, travelling down to Heidelberg unaccompanied?’

Christina nodded, uncomfortably aware that the GI had registered with interest Miss Marshall’s words. As Heidelberg was under American occupation it was quite possible he was also en route
there. If he were, once she was no longer in Miss Marshall’s brisk and no-nonsense company, he might make a serious nuisance of himself. Not for the first time, her heart lurched as she
thought of Jack. Where was he now? She couldn’t possibly write to him whilst she was still in Germany. What would he think when her letters stopped arriving? Someone would write to him,
telling him of where she was – Charlie or Mavis, or maybe even Bob Giles.

‘
Köln!
’ Someone shouted again, as if there could possibly be any mistake about which ravaged, carpet-bomb-blitzed city they had just entered.

‘Can I help you, ma’am?’ It was the GI. His smile revealed perfect dentistry. He was young, fit, well fed and hopeful.

‘No thank you,’ she said firmly.
‘Nein danke. Es geht schon.’

His eyebrows rose. The conversation he had overheard between her and her Red Cross uniformed companion had been in English. And in accentless English as far as he could tell. The easy, familiar
way she spoke the German words was a giveaway, though. They hadn’t been learned parrot-fashion as his smattering of German had been learned. She wasn’t English. She was a Kraut and, if
the blue-black darkness of her shoulder-length hair and the hint of olive in her skin was anything to go by, she was a Jewish Kraut.

She picked up a canvas travelling-bag and followed her companion off the train. He followed a little distance behind her, still watching her. Christ, she was pretty. Her softly swinging hair had
a sheen to it, as if it had been polished. He wondered where she had spent the war years. Certainly not in Germany. There was scarcely a living Jew left in the whole damned country, and those that
were, were skin and bone, the expression in their sunken eyes revealing a brutalization which words couldn’t even begin to describe. Perhaps she wasn’t German but Swiss, and travelling
south via Heidelberg to Basle or Berne. He wondered who was awaiting her arrival. Whoever he was, he was a lucky guy.

Christina stepped down on to the platform, the cold so intense she sucked in her breath, reaching hurriedly into the pocket of her navy coat for her beret.

‘If you think this is bad, can you imagine what it’s going to be like further east, in Berlin?’ Miss Marshall asked, grateful for her bulky hand-knitted woollen socks and
thickly soled English brogues. Brogues that, in Germany, would have brought her a fortune on the black market.

‘Now this is where we’d better say goodbye,’ she said practically as they were jostled on all sides by civilians and French and American soldiers. ‘Amidst all this chaos
there just might be a train heading in the direction you want. You’ve got all your identity papers and travel permits with you? Good. Then all that remains is for me to wish you good luck and
God Bless.’ Seconds later she was gone, swallowed up in the throng, far more important matters on her mind.

Christina put her bag down for a moment and pulled her vibrant kingfisher-blue beret low over her ears to protect them from the stinging cold, then, picking up the bag, she set off alone on the
next stage of her journey.

It took her three days to travel the near one hundred miles between Cologne and Heidelberg. The bridges that had spanned the Rhine had all been bombed. Hastily erected pontoon bridges rocked in
their place. There were American soldiers and American jeeps everywhere. Trains were derailed; were commandeered by occupying troops; didn’t run. Breezily confident GIs, accustomed to
carrying all before them, attempted to pick her up at every turn. At night, she slept in freezing cold station waiting-rooms. By day, she inched her way nearer and nearer to her destination.

Were her mother and grandmother enduring the rigours of the winter in a similar manner? And if they were, how were they managing to survive? Her mother would now be in her early fifties; her
grandmother nearly eighty. Time and again she tried to blot out her last memories of them. The Storm Troopers herding them on to the back of the open truck as if they were cattle. Her grandmother
stumbling and falling, her mother sobbing. One of the Storm Troopers had grabbed at her grandmother’s hair, dragging her to her feet. No-one who was a witness believed Jacoba Berger and Eva
Frank would be seen alive again. And she hadn’t believed it – not for a long, long time.

In the corner of yet another rank-smelling railway carriage, as the last few miles separating her from Heidelberg disappeared beneath its wheels, Christina stared unseeingly out at a landscape
now familiar and wondered what it was that had so changed her mind. Had it been the sight of Leon Emmerson, striding into Magnolia Square when, for three long years, there had been not a word or a
line to indicate he was still alive? She didn’t know, but she did know that once the belief had been born, it had refused to die.

Heidelberg’s ruined castle came into view. Standing high on its wooded hill, it looked unnervingly unchanged. Had it really been ten years since she had lived beneath its shadow? Her
breath caught in her throat. Then, it had signalled home. It did so no longer, for never, as long as she lived, would she think of an inch of German soil as being home. She wasn’t home then
but she was back in her past, and her mother and grandmother would surely be there as well, waiting and praying for their reunion with her.

‘
Heidelberg! Bitte aussteigen!
’

With savage, urgent hope, she heaved her canvas bag from the luggage-rack. She had reached her destination. All she had to do now was to search.

She began in a narrow twisting street in the old part of the town. The road was cobbled, the houses on either side high and decoratively gabled. Her chest was tight, so tight she could hardly
breathe. This was the street of her childhood. It was the street she had played in as a toddler. It was the street she had run down when she had gone to school, her satchel banging against her
legs. There, on the right, had been Levy’s bakery. It was still a bakery, but the name Levy had long gone from above its door and there were no
bagels
or
bialys
on the
half-empty trays in its window. On the left was the room facing the street where Emmanuel Cohen had sat at his shoe-last, nails held between his teeth as he hammered and cobbled, his leather apron
reaching almost to his ankles.

Not all the shops had been Jewish. Heidelberg had never possessed a particularly large Jewish population. Wurtz’s bookshop was still there. Wilhelm Wurtz had been a friend of her
father’s. Where had he been, though, when her father had been dragged with Heini out on to the street and shot? Where had any of the people they had lived amongst been? She forced herself to
keep on walking, knowing the answer. They had been hiding behind shuttered windows, refusing to see; refusing to be held accountable.

She remembered Nuremberg, and her wool-gloved fists tightened. Some of the main perpetrators were, at least, now standing trial for the millions and millions of lives they had destroyed, but
what of the millions who had given them their support? And what of the others? Germans who had never belonged to the Nazi party? Germans who had been appalled by Hitler way back in the thirties
and, as he brought their country to destruction and defeat, had continued to be appalled by him?

She walked past Wilhelm Wurtz’s bookshop knowing that he, and those like him, were also accountable. That their very passivity made them accountable. Her footsteps slowed, stopped. There
was the shop which had once been an
Apotheke
– her father’s
Apotheke.
The window was empty now, a handful of overturned display stands showing that it had last traded as a
milliner’s. Hardly able to breathe, she looked up to the windows above. There, behind the now closed shutters of the third floor bedroom window, she had been born. The room next to it had
been her grandmother’s room. The room below it had been their sitting-room. Nothing looked as it had once looked. The exterior, once so spick and span, was now shabby and uncared for. Paint
peeled off the window frames; the wrought iron of the balconies, once a sunny yellow, were now a patched and dirty grey. A sitting-room window shutter hung by only one hinge. The creeper that had
once clothed the upper storey had long since withered and died.

But someone was still living there. Through one of the windows she could glimpse washing drying. With her heart slamming and the blood beating a crescendo in her ears, she walked across to the
doorstep and knocked on the door that led up to the rooms above the shop. For a long, long time there was no response and then, at last, she heard sounds of movement. Someone was shuffling along
the corridor from the kitchen at the back. Someone elderly and infirm.

‘Please God let it be
Grossmutter
!’ Christina whispered, her mouth dry, the ground unsteady beneath her feet. ‘
Please
, God!
Please!
’

‘
Ja? Kann ich Ihnen helfen?
’ The woman was not, after all, that old. She was simply bone weary and stiff with cold.
‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’
she asked
again, curiosity sharpening her eyes.

‘Is . . . Are . . .’ Her disappointment was so overpowering she was almost incapable of speech. ‘Are Frau Berger and Frau Frank living here?’ she managed at last, in
German. ‘This used to be their home—’

The woman’s look of curiosity vanished. ‘No-one of the names of Berger or Frank has ever lived here,’ she said stolidly. ‘Go away, please. I don’t talk at my door.
My husband is dead – butchered in Normandy. My children are dead. Go away, please.’

‘They
did
live here,’ Christina said passionately, putting the flat of her hand hard against the door, refusing to let the woman close it on her. ‘
I
lived here!
Have my mother and grandmother been back, asking after me? Has anyone—’

‘
Nein! Es tut mir leid!
’ This time the woman succeeded in slamming shut the door.

Outside the bookshop, a skinny cat yowled. An American jeep sped past the top of the street, heading in the direction of the Kornmarkt. A snowflake fell on to her cheek. Numbly she wiped it
away. They weren’t here. She fought a disappointment so monumentally crushing, she could scarcely breathe. Had she really expected them to be in the house that had once been their home? Would
there be a Jew in the whole of Germany living back in the homes from which they had been evicted?

With leaden footsteps, she began to walk back down the narrow street, away from the Kornmarkt. Just because she had not found them immediately did not mean that they weren’t in Heidelberg.
And Heidelberg wasn’t London. It wasn’t a city so big that people could search for each other in it for a lifetime without achieving success. Mist was creeping up from the nearby river
Neckar, snaking over the cobbles. She would have to find somewhere to sleep; somewhere to stay. And she would have to start knocking on doors, showing people photographs of her mother and
grandmother; asking questions. Perhaps the American Headquarters might be the best place to begin her search. Perhaps they had a list of people returning to the city to look for lost relatives.

She was again walking past the bookshop and she paused. If Wilhelm Wurtz had seen her mother and grandmother in the city, he would have recognized them. And even if he hadn’t seen them
since the end of the war, he might have news of where they had been taken to, what had happened to them.

With snowflakes clinging to her beret and the shoulders of her coat, she turned the handle of the door and stepped inside the small, dim, musty-smelling shop. Wilhelm Wurtz was on a step-ladder,
dusting the books on one of his top shelves with a feather duster. As his door chimed open, he stopped what he was doing, peering downwards towards her over the top of rimless spectacles.

‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’
he asked, beginning to clamber back down his step-ladder.

Christina waited until he had safely descended and then said in German, ‘It’s Christina Frank, Herr Wurtz. Do you remember me? I lived with my brother and parents and grandmother at
number nine.’