Tying Down The Lion (15 page)

In the summer of 1943, Beate summoned me into the vegetable garden and told me I would never see my parents again.

“Forget them, Birgit. And forget who you were,” she said, stabbing the hoe at the soil in the potato patch. “That person no longer exists. It’s getting worse for people like you. And if you’re weeded out, they’ll take us all away. They’re watching this house.”

She held out a trowel, but I slipped upstairs and lay down on the pink bedspread that now felt cold and slippery. The sun never reached that room. I lit the candle by the bedside, remembering how my mother used to read to me in the evening light and trying to remember her voice. But I could not even recall her scent.

I dug out my old coat, the one I had worn when I left, and when I held it to my face, there, deep in the weave, was her damp-rose perfume, bringing back my father’s dignified final performance of “Clair de Lune”.

I was from nowhere, a nothing-person. By contrast, Beate was growing rosier and rounder, as if she were ripening. She could recite all the rules of child-rearing. She could darn socks and turn cuffs. She had even made her own wedding-dress. No one had asked for her hand in marriage, but she would not be unprepared when the great day came.

That summer, Beate fell in love with Rainer. The mention of his name melted her like butter on a warm window-sill. His fate had been sealed years before, when she seized his hand on the first day of kindergarten. Once he started working for the railway, he became her captive. She often caught the late train and sat in the front car, her eyes drilling into the back of his head all the way to the terminus and back.

She invited him for coffee and cake every day. His mother often sent feather-light pastries with him, but Beate insisted on feeding him herself.

Ilse and I stifled our giggles in cushions when she served her traditional German tree cake, its layers resembling the growth-rings of a tree. When Rainer dropped it on his plate, the crash was like a falling oak. We were tempted to shout, “Timber!”

If he called when she was sewing, she would kick the wedding-gown under the sofa. “Don’t look. It’s bad luck,” she squealed, coyly allowing a trail of lace to show. But he made no attempt to catch a glimpse of it, nor did he ever propose.

While Beate sliced the cake, she looked on with affection at Rainer playing whist with Ilse and me. She beamed if he let Ilse win, but screwed her mouth into a knot if he paid attention to me.

Because I had to be distrustful of everyone, I interpreted the kindly light in his eyes as pretence. For all I knew, he could be a Jew-catcher.

After coffee and concrete cake, Rainer struck up a lively waltz on the piano and watched with amusement as an exasperated Beate tried to teach me the steps. And when it was my turn to play, I thumped out Beethoven with my foot pressing hard on the sustain-pedal in order to prove how German I could be. Beate would shout at me to quiet down, but I played on, aware Rainer was watching, his sandy eyebrows raised and his wide mouth stretched into a huge smile, until Beate lumbered across the drawing-room and slammed the lid.

One afternoon when I was alone, my fingers slid to the positions for Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. After a long hesitation, I touched the keys just enough to make a discreet sound, the echo faint, but enough to stir memories of home. I played the entire piece, sweating from nerves. Someone might be opening the letter-box or crouching in the shrubbery to listen.

“Can you play it louder?” a voice behind me asked as I lingered over the final chord. Ilse, so light on her feet, had crept in through the garden door. Unfamiliar with Mendelssohn’s work, she knew only that the music had moved her.

“I love it, Birgit, but you play like a mouse.”

For the first time in years, I cried for the end of simple pleasures. Ilse took my hand from the piano keys and held it between hers. There were no words she could say. She gave her wise smile instead, and it felt like a gift. After I had dried my eyes, I saw one of the long curtains billow and knew Rainer stood behind it, listening.

The Nazis cast their net wider. Beate began urging Rainer to buy her a ring, always afraid of her few drops of degenerate blood, hoping marriage to a non-Jew would provide her with the same shelter her father had given his family.

One afternoon in the drawing-room, Rainer offered to play the piano so us girls could dance. Beate sat in her chair, measuring her sausage-like ring finger, while Ilse and I rolled up the rugs and Rainer pushed back the furniture, causing no end of squealing when the wedding-gown flopped out from its hiding-place, exposing the huge bell-sleeves sewn from the lace curtains in Beate’s bedroom.

“Go and find something else to do, you two,” Beate told Ilse and me, bundling the dress back into its hiding place.

“Oh, Beate, let us just enjoy ourselves,” Rainer said. “While we still can.”

I think he meant the war, but she took it as a hint that marriage was a dreadful bind. Determined not to give up, she dragged him outside and down the garden-path to discuss wedding-flowers, thrusting roses under his nose. But this time, Rainer hurried back to the house as if stung by a bee. With a regretful glance at our makeshift dance floor, he picked up his jacket and, recalling a sudden errand, dodged the proposal as well as the strudel Beate tried posting into his pocket as he fled.

At his next visit, he explained that during his free afternoons, he would be taking up fishing. It was in the national interest. Hitler, he told Beate, encouraged it.

“But only for men. You women must sit at home and sew.”

When he passed the house with his fishing-pole, he speared little notes for Ilse and me on the hook and cast them up to the bedroom window.

Beate started eating too much of her own marzipan, sitting about with plates on her lap while she fretted over rumours of more round-ups of Jews. Ilse and I tried to keep them at bay, but she took out her anxiety on me.

“Stop loving them for God’s sake,” she said, catching me with a photograph my parents had slipped inside a poetry book. My aunt had told me to burn them, but I refused to give up the only keepsakes I had left.

Beate more or less frog-marched me downstairs, fetched her mother from the kitchen, where she was hauling a chocolate log from the oven, and made her agree I must throw both the picture and the book in the fire.

“Better perhaps to throw in that chocolate log,” I muttered as they held my arm towards the flames. But at the last second, when I let the book fall, I slid the picture inside my cuff. It was a small victory, not over my aunt and Beate, whose fear I understood, but over the Nazis who thought they could destroy everything we valued.

I trained myself not to care whenever I was reminded of my status as the third daughter, the one who did not fit and made them all so vulnerable. They were not cruel people, but I was the stray mongrel they could never shoo away, and worse, one day I might bite.

When occasional treats were bought for Beate and Ilse, I was banished to the kitchen. It was unfair to expect them to divide everything three ways. Sweet-wrappers and new hats were always tidied away before I was allowed into the drawing-room again, but, despite the well-hidden evidence, it was hard to ignore what I was missing and pretend I did not care.

However, as I grew up, the exclusion gave me a comfortable sense of apartness, a kind of pride. Standing in the kitchen, warm from the steam of cabbage-soup and noodles while they ate violet-creams in the chilly best room, I was on the edge of their life. But at least I was reunited with myself.

Slipping off a shoe, I slid my toes over the seams between the mosaic floor tiles until I knew every bump, every rough edge, every inch of the pattern, until I was more familiar with that mosaic than with my own name. I felt a strange pleasure that I knew it better than they did.

But as the danger increased, the fact that I was different became too heavy a burden to shrug off. Spot-checks were being carried out in the streets. Papers must be produced.

My uncle bought me a passport on the black market. He sat at the kitchen table with his white cuffs folded back, prised off the photograph, carefully laying it aside out of respect for the dead owner, and replaced it with mine. My aunt hard-boiled an egg and he peeled off the hot shell, blowing on his scalded fingers. He rolled the egg over the official stamp inked on the dead woman’s photograph. The warm, moist egg absorbed the purple ink so that when he rolled it over my picture, there I was, a valid person.

But false papers could not guarantee protection. While Jews produced their new identities, informers were handing lists of real names to the Gestapo. In the mission to rinse Berlin clean, these lists displaced all other paperwork.

My proud sense of being ‘other’ turned into a disfigurement. People were staring. Neighbours no longer said hello in the park. On sunny days we spotted the flash of binoculars from our neighbour’s window. Ilse’s schoolteacher began asking her questions about me, demanding answers until Ilse darted out of her lesson and raced home, crying with fear.

“She’s panicking,” Beate told my aunt, clutching Ilse and turning away from me. “She’ll say something. We can’t take the chance.”

“I won’t tell,” Ilse said, mouthing me a heartfelt sorry. I gave her a smile. ‘Not your fault’, I hoped it said.

My aunt ushered me up to the top floor staircase, and we crawled into the attic. “I feel unsafe with you near windows and doors,” she said. “Tell me, why could you not bring home the fish I asked you to collect this morning?”

I had hoped I would not have to explain. “The shopkeeper wouldn’t give it to me. It was wrapped up with your name on the paper. But he said he had changed his mind.”

My aunt cupped my face in her hands, the way my father once did. I saw compassion in her eyes, but I also saw horror, reading her expression as clearly as I had read the family name on that wretched fish.

“Birgit,” she said, “the price for harbouring Jews is severe. The whispers about you are now deafening. Soon, we must decide, either to save your skin or our own.”

A whisper is a terrifying sound.

I had to stay in the attic, where at least there was peace and the homely smell of warm blankets. I was told not to go near the gap in the wooden struts, but I gazed all day, drawn to the stripe of light, wondering what I would do if I saw the Gestapo marching through the iron gates.

At first it felt like a game, a temporary relocation. Maybe Rainer could pass food up to me on the end of his fishing-line or my dog would be found and allowed in with me if he didn’t cock his leg on the linens. But soon it became a sweltering cell.

“Please let me out,” I begged my aunt one day. “I can’t breathe.”

“Don’t you dare risk it,” she said. “Even some Jews have become catchers, turning their own kind over to the Gestapo. And God knows what they would do to us Jew-helpers.”

“Could I please come down for a minute and play a little quiet Beethoven?”

“No such thing,” Beate said, looming into the tiny space, never able to let her mother out of sight for long. “For God’s sake, let us save you, Birgit. We’re trying to think of a way. Just keep quiet until we do. Another huge round-up of Jews is being planned. Thousands, they say. You have to be absolutely concealed.”

But sometimes I slipped out at night, just to feel air on my face. The dark streets of Berlin seemed neutral to me, almost benign. I stood under trees in the park and listened to the leaves, watching for torches. If I saw a beam, I hunched deeper into the shadows. The world had become so disturbed that instead of being a guide, a simple stream of light was now a shaft of warning.

One night when I came home, inching the heavy front door closed, I knocked over the hat-stand. It woke Beate. She clumped downstairs to see me struggling out of my uncle’s big dark coat that I used for camouflage. She wrenched the stand upright, quite a feat since it was mahogany, and flung all the hats and coats at me until I begged her to stop.

“When will you learn?” she shouted. “There is no disguise for you.”

My time with the family was over.

None of us slept that night. Ilse and I listened to September rain pelting on the kitchen windows while my aunt and uncle murmured into the telephone and Beate threaded needles.

“I’m sorry, Beate,” I said. “I was no good at this wretched hiding game.”

“Who could be?” she said. “No rules, are there?”

I nodded. It was the closest we came to an understanding. I wished I could hug her. She had become my sister in her own way. I had evaded most of her lessons, yet she managed to teach me how to embroider and bake, even if my bread almost broke the beaks of the ducks we once fed in the park. But I was still the enemy.

“Rainer will be here soon,” she said shortly before dawn.

I froze.

She was trying to cut through one of her rye loaves to make Rainer a sandwich, but I clutched her arm.

“Beate, don’t let him take me. Either hide me or let me go. Please.”

“God in Heaven,” she said, sighing and arching her formidable eyebrows. “Look, do you really imagine he catches fish every afternoon? He’s found a way to hide you, Birgit. He’s already helped many others.” She paused and looked up. “I only hope God will help him.”

As soon as he arrived, Beate wrapped her meaty arms around him. When I saw the tender way he extricated himself from her, my instincts told me I should trust this man.

“I have arranged a new home for you, Birgit,” he said. “My friend works in an armaments factory with a storeroom at the back.”

“A storeroom will do,” I said.

“No. It’s less than that.” He took a long gasp of his cigarette. “There’s this cupboard in it...”

“So, Birgit has a cupboard. Perfect,” Beate said, hurling things into my case.

“Er…no,” Rainer said. He avoided my eyes by blowing a long plume of smoke above his head.

“What do I have?” I asked him. “Please tell me.”

“Well, this cupboard, which is full of oiled screws and welders’ goggles, has a false back. And behind that, there is a small gap.”

“A gap?”