Restitution (21 page)

‘Thanks, I’d like to teach it some day.’ She stopped, surprised. The idea seemed to have come from nowhere.

The labour pains caught her as she poured water at the lunch table. The jug crashed to the floor, water cascading over the parquet floor and reminding her – even then
– of a white porcelain coffee cup smashing on another floor in another world.

‘I’ll fetch the doctor.’ Joseph White jumped up, pulling his jacket off the back of the chair. She shook her head.

‘It might take ages yet.’

There was a quarter-of-an-hour lull, during which she sat in the kitchen, sipping a glass of water and then pacing up and down, counting the floor tiles between the range and the kitchen table.
So far from home. So far away from anyone who knew what had happened to her. ‘Gregor,’ she whispered. ‘Where are you? We need you.’

We. This unwanted fellow traveller had somehow assumed a place in her life.

When the pains came in ten-minute intervals she allowed Emily to take her upstairs. ‘You’re young,’ Emily told her. ‘You’ll do fine. Concentrate on your
breathing.’ Emily’s sister was a midwife; her mother, too. Emily knew about these things, knew to keep Alix’s lips moist and to let her walk around between contractions while she
still could. Knew when to reassure, when to cajole, when to order. ‘You can scream,’ she told Alix. ‘If it helps, just bellow, honey.’

But Alix knew the von Matkes didn’t scream. They were brave in battle, when tortured in some Gestapo cell, when pinned to the snowy ground by a Russian conscript. Alexandra von Matke was a
Prussian officer’s daughter and she would act like one.

They laid the child in her arms with some reluctance. His eyes were almost violet, not the usual baby blue. The baby’s hair was dark, though Emily said it might fall out
and be replaced with fairer down. Alix looked at him and knew he’d been himself from the moment of his conception, in her bedroom at home, while a wolf prowled outside. Her hands tightened on
her sheet.

Emily sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Who’s Gregor?’

‘How did you . . .?’

‘You were calling for him.’

‘A family friend.’

Emily looked from the child to Alix. ‘The Russian soldier. I thought . . .’

So the doctor at the base hadn’t passed on to the Whites what Alix had told him. He’d been as kind as he looked. Or perhaps too embarrassed by the whole situation to wish to involve
himself in matters of paternity.

‘The Russian isn’t his father.’ She looked down at her son. ‘He was too drunk.’

‘How can you be sure?’

Alix stared at the infant. ‘I just know.’

Emily stood up. ‘I see. That changes things.’ Alix saw something in her face she couldn’t understand. Not unkindness, not exactly, but a new coolness, as though Alix had let
her down. Well, she had let them all down, hadn’t she? Mother of a bastard child. Her head throbbed. She longed to be alone with the baby; he was the only one who mattered. Emily stood.

‘Try and feed him.’ She muttered something to Joseph, who was standing in the doorway.

Alix dropped her head to the baby. He eyed her with those vivid eyes of his and seemed to sigh, his head heavy in the crook of her arm.

The doctor returned and examined her again. ‘I’m pleased to say that you seem to have managed very well.’ He swallowed. ‘You should be able to undergo
another pregnancy despite the damage. If you ever marry, that is.’ His voice contained a note of doubt.

‘It doesn’t seem likely.’ She turned her face to the wall.

‘You never know. Some men don’t mind as much as others about previous . . . encounters and, well, the consequences. Especially in wartime.’

Alix nodded.

Emily saw the doctor downstairs and returned alone. ‘Does this change how you feel about the baby?’ Her face was pale.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The doctor says you can still have other children.’ The old Alix would have felt indignant that they had discussed her health so freely behind her back, but what was she but a
defeated enemy? ‘So you might be more likely to . . .’

‘To what?’

‘To let him go to a good family.’ Emily twisted her hands as she peeped at the baby. ‘But this isn’t the time for talking about this.’

‘It doesn’t change a thing.’ Alix closed her eyes to blot out her view of the cot. When she’d fed him last night he’d stared at her with his violet eyes.
She’d tried to look away but found she couldn’t.

‘Alix . . . we were wondering . . .’ Emily was gabbling. ‘Joseph and I can’t have children.’

‘You told me. I’m very sorry.’ Alix knew how the Whites regretted their childlessness.

‘Your baby – it seems so hard to send him to strangers.’

‘You do it every day.’ She hadn’t meant to sound so curt.

Emily looked away briefly. ‘Some of the DP children have absolutely no family or friends left.’ The older woman put a hand on her arm. ‘Would you consider letting us adopt him?
He’d grow up in the States. We can give him a wonderful home and we’d care for him so well, believe me, Alix. We already love him.’

Alix had seen them: Emily cradling the baby, Joseph sitting beside her prattling to him. Tens of thousands of German mothers in her position would have jumped at the chance.

‘It would be better for him.’ Emily’s grasp on Alix’s arm tightened.

The grandfather clock on the landing struck the half-hour. Alix shivered.

Gregor

Pomerania, February 1945

Vavilov and Gregor opened the bedroom door. Empty. They stared at the scarves and scissors on the carpet.

Marie. She must have crept back up here while they were examining the objects in the salon. Time enough for her to turn the key in the lock and release Preizler.

In an instant Vavilov had removed his revolver from its holster. Gregor darted to the window. Across the snow he made out two figures, a man and a woman. ‘They’re making for the
forest.’

Vavilov’s hand clasped his arm. ‘Not so fast, Comrade.’

‘They’ll get away—’

‘The regulars are on the way. He won’t get far. You said “they”. Who else is out there?’

Gregor made himself meet the amber eyes. ‘I believe it’s the baroness. She must have returned to the house.’

‘Nobody else?’

‘No.’

Vavilov let him go and walked towards the dressing table. He picked up one of the photos showing Marie with an infant Alix. ‘I wonder how she got in here without you seeing her. You locked
the doors last night, did you not?’

Gregor nodded. Vavilov sounded calm. But the key left in the lock, the two escapees. Such carelessness could merit a death sentence.

‘Perhaps she was already inside last night? In a cellar or attic, perhaps?’ Vavilov sounded as though he were trying to solve some parlour-game riddle. Gregor had heard him employ
the same relaxed tones with captured landowners he was about to interrogate. He longed to put his hand into his pack and touch the cyanide capsules in their tattered envelope, just to be sure they
were still there.

Shouts from the front of the house broke the tension. ‘Here are our comrades. Shall we let them in?’ A note of irony in Vavilov’s voice now. ‘You can brief them about the
dangerous political prisoners and they will track them down for us.’

The conscripts had already pushed their way up the steps to the front door by the time Gregor and Vavilov came downstairs. ‘All right.’ Vavilov looked at the watch he’d had
since Gregor had known him. ‘One hour to take what you can.’ Something had flattened his tone, disapproval, perhaps? But of whom? The soldiers? Gregor? The Junkers who’d owned
Alexanderhof and its contents? ‘But you five,’ he pointed at a group. ‘Are to go into the forest immediately and catch a middle-aged woman and her companion, a senior Fascist
police officer in plain clothes. There’ll be extra soup if you bring them back here alive.’

The five selected did as they were told. Gregor heard their boots crunching through the snow as they ran for the trees.

The others came inside, eyes glinting. Down in the cellars they’d find the best vintages from Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Moselle, collected over a hundred years and recorded in a black
leather book by Peter, his father and grandfather. Peter had also laid down a case of vintage port when Alix was born, in the English fashion. She’d been supposed to receive the bottles on
her wedding day. Gregor watched as the conscripts ran below the antlers in the entrance hall, boots dripping snow over the marble floor, some of them pausing to blink at the chandelier and the
grandfather clock. One of them turned towards Gregor and Vavilov. ‘If they had so much themselves, why did they come to drive us out of our homes?’

‘Well expressed, Comrade,’ Vavilov answered. ‘Now get on with it.’ He glanced at Gregor. ‘Talking of things taken, you’d better give me that gun you took from
your prisoner.’

The men’s excitement grew even greater with the discovery of Marie’s lingerie drawer: confections of silk and lace the like of which they’d never seen and
that seemed to fuel their conviction that German women were whores, and probably glad of the attentions of the Red Army. Their pillaging of the salon only took off when they’d slashed Great
Aunt Friederika’s portrait, claiming she was a witch and would put spells on them. Even as the knife tore the canvas round her face Friederika seemed to glare down at Gregor, as though asking
him who on earth had allowed these Russians into her house. When she lay in tatters on the Persian rug a cheer went up and they enjoyed a celebratory smash of the Meissen ornaments Marie had left
in the glass cabinet. Gregor left them to see what was happening upstairs.

They hadn’t reached the maids’ rooms in the attic where Gregor suspected Marie would have stored the particularly valuable china and jewels, along with the missing gramophone
records. They’d wasted too much time trying to detach the clock from the landing wall. Their failure had engendered so much rage Gregor thought they’d smash the glass, but then someone
shouted out that they’d found a room full of kids’ stuff.
Alix’s room.
They emptied the chest of drawers and took armfuls of her clothes downstairs. Her silver photo frames
were valuable but the photographs themselves good only for throwing out of the window, where they fluttered down to the flowerbeds with the snowflakes. Her books made satisfying thumps as they fell
the same way.

And to make it quite clear what they thought about people like this, two of them used her bed as a latrine.

Gregor felt a heaviness in his stomach. Several times his mouth opened to shriek at them to stop. But he couldn’t. He knew what had happened to their own villages in Russia, houses burned
with or without their occupants in them, women driven out into the snow with their children. People starved, shot, tormented.

When they’d finished in Alix’s room he cleared up the worst of it and stood for a moment studying the emptied bookshelves, smashed ornaments and disembowelled soft toys. Then he went
to find Vavilov. He might as well face him. The cyanide was now in his tunic pocket, easily accessible. Best to know the worst. The five men who’d gone out into the forest still hadn’t
returned with Preizler and the baroness. Perhaps they’d shot them despite Vavilov’s orders.

He found his superior in Peter’s study, examining papers he’d taken from the filing cabinet. ‘Not much here.’ Vavilov snapped shut a roll-lever file. Propped up against
the side of the desk was a photograph album. Vavilov must have found it in the salon.

Gregor peered at the documents spread over the desktop – farm invoices and receipts.

‘I saw a threshing machine and tractor in one of the sheds,’ Vavilov said. ‘Nice equipment.’

Vavilov never missed anything.

‘Have you had any more thoughts as to how long the baroness had been in the house?’ he went on.

‘Hard to be sure exactly, Comrade Vavilov.’

The older man’s slow stare seemed to penetrate Gregor’s mind. ‘Tell me something, Comrade.’

Gregor willed the muscles of his face into inscrutability.

‘There are four used coffee cups in the kitchen. You didn’t have company last night, did you? Apart from the Gestapo officer, I mean.’

‘The family must have drunk it before they left.’ Gregor couldn’t find the steel to tell Vavilov another direct lie. But dodging the question could be just as bad for him.

‘Perhaps they had connections with the SS base we overran a few days ago.’ Vavilov squared a pile of papers on the desk. ‘We found the packet of coffee in the kitchen with the
stamped label.’

He dropped his head to study the sheet on top of the pile, a list of grain yields. ‘Amazing how efficiently the Germans farm their land. Even with all our plans we don’t seem to
match these percentages.’

Gregor repressed a shiver. Dangerous statements to make.

‘When we get to Berlin we can see who’s still around.’ Vavilov scooped up the sheets. He didn’t look disappointed that his search had yielded no results. He pushed them
to one side and picked up the photograph album, flicking through the yellowing leaves. Gregor tried to retain a blank expression as pictures of himself and Alix, Marie and Peter, and his parents
passed beneath Vavilov’s fingers. Vavilov lingered over a photograph of Marie and Eva dressed for tennis.

A shriek outside in the kitchen garden pierced the silence. Vavilov frowned. ‘Have they found someone?’

Not Alix, please God, not her. Or her mother. Let it be some other unfortunate female.

Gregor ran to the garden and shouted for order. When the throng dispersed he found it wasn’t a woman they were fighting over but the tabby cat. ‘We’ve got no food for cats,
it’ll just die,’ he told them. ‘You know Comrade Vavilov’s fondness for animals, he will wish you to leave it here.’ The soldier with the Asiatic eyes clutched the
tabby even closer.

‘And it might have been infected with a disease.’ The conscripts had been fed so much propaganda about what they could expect from the Germans that they’d believe anything,
even that the Nazis had injected domestic pets with germs. The soldier dropped the tabby, which shot into the stable, miaowing in protest. Gregor couldn’t begin to explain to himself why
he’d wanted to save the wretched animal: what was one cat? When he was back in that hulk on the way to Magadan, it would merit him nothing that he’d saved a single cat instead of the
girl he loved.
Loved.
The word seemed to burn through his body. Alix, so long unseen, so suddenly rediscovered, his love, his link to the old world of meals served on linen-covered tables,
arguments about books and houses filled with cut flowers.