Authors: Esther Freud
Marianna stood by Eva’s bed and smiled down at her, glancing from her bemused face to the ruddy open mouths of the local children. It was their teacher who had insisted. ‘It is a tradition of the village,’ he told her, ‘and so long since there was a child in the house.’
‘But I don’t want to be entertained by anyone,’ Eva had protested.
And Bina, on hearing the news, insisted she and Martha be taken back to Berlin in order to escape this new humiliation. ‘Never has anyone been so grand,’ she complained to Schu-Schu, as the carriage whisked them back to the city, and they pitied Eva for being left behind, alone and at the mercy of their mother.
Soon Eva was allowed outside for short stretches of fresh air so long as she gave her promise not to leave the lawn and at all costs to avoid straying into the bad association of the orchard. Gaglow was deserted. Wolf had returned to his work, and Bina and Martha, in the company of Fräulein Schulze, had insisted on remaining in Berlin.
Through the long hours of afternoons Eva watched her mother from an upstairs window wandering about her garden, examining the restored splendour of the grounds and making small adjustments in the absence of the gardeners. Paths had been cleared from under beds of bindweed, and over their first summer at Gaglow the gold and turquoise lichen was scaled off the statue. It fell in mossy shavings round the feet of a forgotten nymph, until one morning, pale and glimmering, it appeared stone naked in the centre of the lawn. The fountain was unblocked, the pipes repaired, and floating lilies that had clogged the pond were thinned and cleared and given space to stretch their leaves.
Marianna came up to visit in the early evening when, having bathed her hands in rose water and sprinkled it on her hair, she would take Eva’s fingers in her own and ask Omi Lise for her progress. In the first days, when Eva was still drained and dizzy, Marianna sat with her and told her stories. She told her about journeys she had made when she was still a child, and how her parents took their holidays in shifts. ‘I always hated my summer birthday,’ she said, ‘because it fell on the last day of school and was a day of packing.’ Each July she and her mother travelled up into the mountains, and on their return, her father set off alone for two weeks by the sea. Marianna’s mother stood in for him as head of the firm. She sat at his desk and smiled down at the five men he hired to help him in his printing business, using the time to stitch monograms in coloured thread on to the table linen. ‘It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I went on holiday with my father, our first and last,’ and she thought of the pneumonia and how, until now, it had been a curse over her life.
‘Was he ill for a very long time?’ Eva asked, but Marianna simply shook her head, wincing at the vision of her mother, arriving half an hour too late.
Eva had never spent so much time alone with her mother. She found herself forgetting the years of collected woes, the tiny details of deceit and treachery, and took to watching her fondly from above, her broad-brimmed hat high over her hair, and the row of cloth-covered buttons, like jewels, scattered down the front of her dress. Her face, above the stiff, fluted collar, was lost in shadow, but Eva could see her arms waving and hear her shouts as she rallied her depleted team of gardening men, pointing and explaining and plucking at her gloves as if she would like to tear them off and plunge her own hands into the earth. Once, after a short, sharp letter from Bina, full of sneers and messages of pity, Eva tied a knot in the hem of her nightdress to remind her, when it caught against her toes, whose side she was meant to be on.
Eva did not like to let her brother know about her illness. Instead she wrote,
Dear Manu,
I’ve been thinking how we could have a fence around our house made from rows of runner beans. In my opinion the little red flowers are prettier than anything and just think how useful it would be when we are suddenly in need of lunch. I know our intention is to lead a very simple life but I’ve set my heart on a bath made exactly to my measurements, so I can rest my head and stretch my toes right to the end. Let me know if you would also like one and I’ll draw up plans.
Your devoted sister, Eva.
As he read, Emanuel saw her small mouth chattering, confiding the plans, the familiar dreams she insisted that he share, and he always saved her words for last. Bina’s letters were packed with news. ‘The facts are,’ she often began, and she would search about among the things she knew to let him into something gruesome. She had a talent for disaster and would sniff it out, drawing it in towards herself, however distant. Martha spent hours, her pen in her mouth, pondering on the perfect way to phrase her thoughts. Her letters began quite formally but soon trailed, sidetracking into snatches of myth and ancient history and revealing secrets closely kept on behalf of other girls at school. She thought of her brother in a place not dissimilar to Antarctica and trusted he would be the one person capable of keeping these things to himself.
*
Emanuel received more letters than any other man in his regiment. He was teased and envied and occasionally asked to arrange correspondence for a soldier less fortunate than himself. ‘They can’t all be your sisters,’ they nudged, and when he insisted that they were, and that they would make for baffling if not useless pen pals, they asked to see a picture. Emanuel had a photograph, the three girls at Gaglow dressed in white and lying on cane chairs in the sun of the summer porch, but he shook his head and swore there was no such thing. The other man cursed him for a liar and a cheat and slapped him on the shoulder, but as he walked away Emanuel heard him mutter that he was nothing but a Jew, and didn’t deserve the honour of dying for his country.
No one except Schu-Schu suspected that Emanuel would not come home on the first day of his leave, but after six long months, despite his promise, he found it impossible to stay away.
‘Would you come in and dance with us, just once?’ Eva begged him, as they waited in the shade of the veranda for the first young ladies to arrive.
Marianna, anxious that her daughters’ social education should not be thwarted by the war, had set up a network of dancing lessons to be carried out at various houses throughout the summer.
‘I may do.’ Emanuel squeezed her hand. ‘But I wouldn’t want to upset your partner.’
‘Oh, Amalie won’t mind, and anyway you could dance with her as well. She’s never danced with a man. No one except old Herr Friedrichson.’
‘And you, have you danced with any men?
Eva smiled and frowned simultaneously so that her eyes almost disappeared. ‘Only with you.’
Emanuel had dreamed on many miserable nights of holding the Samson sisters in his arms. Either one, or both, but now as he sat in the drawing room listening to the rolling piano and the tap of the old dancing teacher’s cane, he felt disinclined even to see them. But when the soothing rumble of a waltz drifted under the door of the hall, he clicked his boots together and, for the sake of Eva, made his entrance.
There were twelve girls in the room, six couples, and as each whirling partner turned and saw him, a blush spread up over her neck and face and turned the dance into a burning ring of pink. Emanuel stood in uniform by the door. He lowered his eyes and watched the feet and ankles of the girls. ‘One two three, one two three,’ tapped old Herr Friedrichson, nodding with his twirled moustache and sweltering in the shiny cloth of his coat. ‘One two three, one two three.’ As Emanuel’s eyes swept the room he wished he could shake the hard sneer for all this prettiness from the corners of his mouth.
When the music stopped Eva broke away quickly from the plump embrace of her partner and presented herself before her brother, smiling up at him for the next dance. Fräulein Schulze, who was standing by the piano, rescued the deserted Amalie and they set off again, accompanied by the ponderous chords of the ancient Frau Mendel who had been almost completely deaf since her seventieth birthday more than a decade before.
As he moved around the room Emanuel watched the dancing over Eva’s head. ‘One two three, one two three,’ he could feel her breath counting out the steps against his shoulder, ‘one two three, one two three.’ And he found himself longing to hiss some horrible truth into her hot ear.
Angelika and Julika danced together, their slim bare arms clasped loosely round the other’s waist and their chestnut hair curled with the heat in identical cowlicks on their foreheads. They smiled at him from across the room, a turning circle of radiance, and he saw them as a two-headed mermaid, luring men ashore, with their sweet calling voices, to be crushed against the rocks.
‘I shall make my excuse and go,’ Emanuel swore, but almost before one dance finished another began, and his partners replaced themselves in his arms with a strange fluidity that was somehow lost once the music began again and Herr Friedrichson’s cane trotted out the steps.
First Emanuel danced with each of his sisters. Martha, the tallest of the three, was the most graceful, while Bina, too used to years of leading, stumbled and hit against his boots. ‘One two three,’ she breathed and, like a swing boat, they moved stiffly back and forth across the room.
The dancing class ran half an hour over its normal length to give each of the girls a chance to dance with the dazzling, uniformed guest of honour. Emanuel, after his very first waltz, had longed for nothing more than to slip away. He was prepared to give up the chance even of holding the delicate, blushing Julika in his arms to get back to the drawing room where he could lie in comfort among the polished dark wood of the furniture.
‘Oh, Schu, won’t you have a dance with Manu?’ Eva whispered, when the music finally stopped, but the governess looked straight into his eyes and said she could see the poor man was exhausted and needed to be left alone.
That night dinner was served out on the terrace. There was a goose with thick crackling skin and a salad of broad beans, and as he ate Emanuel found that he was retelling, in great detail, how half of his regiment had been wiped out. ‘We were running towards a village when gunmen opened fire on us,’ he heard his voice, insistent as he chewed, drilling on and on, ‘but instead of firing back the call went out: “Don’t shoot, they are our own men retreating.” This was clearly not the case, but there was nothing to be done but curse into the ground, and attempt to avoid the torrent of the shells. It was only when our own artillery appeared and began to shoot that the order was given to advance, and all without a flicker of apology.’ He looked across the table at the bright eyes of his sisters and pulled himself up short. ‘I shall not describe,’ he said, ‘the trail of dead and injured for whom we were not allowed to stop.’ But he found he could still hear them calling out to him as he cut the meat in strips across his plate.
Wolf poured him a glass of wine. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, and unable to think of what else to add, he shambled off towards the cellar to draw out another bottle.
Emanuel spent his afternoons reading in his room, aware at times of the rustle of one or other of his sisters as they summoned up the courage to interrupt him. ‘We’re going on a swimming picnic to the lake,’ Eva called, twisting the handle of his door, and he answered gruffly that he would still be there when she returned and would most likely see them all at supper. There was a hurt and painful silence, and he had to shuffle his papers ferociously and slam his book down on his desk before he heard her move away and take off at a run along the corridor.
‘How extraordinary that so little has changed here,’ he muttered, as he wandered round the house, and he failed to notice that the table was not so lavishly laid as it had been and that his mother wore the same summer dresses, with small alterations and adjustments, as she had the previous year.
Even Fräulein Schulze seemed subdued. Her red hair looked strangely pale, pulled severely from her face, and the tasks she set them were overseen without her usual vigour. ‘It’s so good to have our Manu home again.’ Eva snaked an arm around her as they headed out over the fields to the lake.
‘For one more day.’ Fräulein Schulze nodded, and hardening her tone, she shouted to Martha to look where she was going. ‘You’ll tear your skirt if you swing along like that.’ She pulled her arm away from Eva, hurrying her along, and refusing to wave to the row of poor prisoners in their red trousers hoeing the field.
I could hear the main maternity ward from the quiet of my room. Babies wailing, women laughing, visitors parading up and down, and above it all, the constant ringing of a squat grey telephone on wheels. On the third day I was moved to a bed right in the middle. A huge man sat almost beside me. He had a spider tattooed around his neck and he held his baby up against his chest, while the new mother slipped out on to the fire escape to smoke.
A doctor came in to check Sonny’s legs. They were still bent high at the hip where they’d been tucked underneath his chin and I was warned that a breech baby often took some time to straighten out. The doctor eased him from his towelling Babygro and pulled his vest over his head. Sonny didn’t like it and his face creased up with alarm. ‘Nothing wrong with this one.’ He seemed unperturbed by Sonny’s screams, pulling him up by the hands to test his grip and pressing his hips flat, until his whole head was dark red with roaring. Unable to control myself I snatched him out of the doctor’s care. I wrapped him quickly, pressing his body against mine. His crying stopped. His hands clung in my hair and a great storm of love welled up between us.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Pam hung her head, ‘but it seemed wrong not to call Mike.’
‘He’s coming again today.’
‘And?’
It was hard to know.
‘You’re not going to forgive him?’ She shook her head appalled.
‘Well, we did say we’d stay friends. Pam . . .’ I had a quick and guilty image of her on the day that we’d split up, rushing from her car with cigarettes and brandy and a bunch of bright blue flowers. ‘I’m too sick to smoke,’ I’d wailed, and at each end of the sofa, our feet pushed into cushions, I told her about Mike and his reaction to my news. ‘He said I’d tried to trick him, planned it, was ruining his life,’ and I bit furiously into toast to stop myself from feeling sick.