Authors: Esther Freud
I feel like Sleeping Beauty, lying here in my white world. Every day I sit and watch the snow falling on the fir trees, sealing the river with another layer of ice. From where I am, so far behind the line, even the shells give the impression of falling softly, landing with the thud and scatter of a snowball, and it is only the occasional burst of artillery that rouses me and disturbs me from my books. Sometimes I am so far away, lost in someone else’s story, that I have to shake my head and look down at my patched boots to remind myself that I am in reality a member of the Kaiser’s army.
Reading is the one thing I am gaining from this war, but it means I am also painfully reminded, unlike the characters I read about, that I am leading a life utterly devoid of drama. What kind of a story would my life make? A man rushes into battle, bursting to risk his life, and then remains through an entire winter with his feet beside a fire, waiting for the pussy willow to open up outside the window and signal the arrival of spring.
In the last days of 1915, Emanuel wrote home,
While hundreds of thousands of men crouched freezing in the trenches, I have spent my second wartime Christmas in a comfortable farmhouse, several kilometres behind the front line. I and five other scouts sat drinking before a blazing fire in the company of our superior officers, and in order to blot out the misery of our friends we finished up our jug and drank a second. With the third our spirits rose so high that we ran out into the snow to cut down a Christmas tree. We decorated it with lighted twists of paper and watched, transfixed, as the guns battered on in a two-hundred-metre ring around it. The talk was not, as it was the year before, of Germany’s Decisive Victory. There is rarely now any mention of politics or an end to the war, and as the night sped by, anecdotes concerning the treacherousness of certain skiing routes formed a breathless queue to be listened to and told. At midnight a ludicrous cartwheel competition broke out, and men whose fingers would have frozen under soberer conditions threw off their gloves and, placing their palms squarely on the ice, displayed their skill at backflips. I woke the following morning convinced I had spent the night lying on a slab of stone, and found to my disgust that I was sunk luxuriously among the feather pillows of a high down bed. It was the gravelly voice of an officer that roused me, singing as he rubbed his face with snow. ‘Si–ilent night, ho–oly night.’ And I found that, despite myself, I had to laugh.
The family were out at Gaglow for the first warm week in spring when the telegram arrived. A boy ran up with it from the village, his heart beating wildly and his mouth twisted up in a frantic desire to suit the seriousness of the occasion. He delivered it straight into Wolf Belgard’s hands and stopped to watch him open it. Wolf only noticed him, a small pale boy, his hand over his mouth, when he had finished studying the envelope, turning it over and over to convince himself that it was not the news he dreaded. ‘Get away,’ he shouted, sweeping his arms, and then, seeing the streaks of sweat like tear stains on the boy’s dirty face, he called him back and told him to go round to the side door to drink a glass of water.
Wolf walked out into the garden to tear open the seal then, feeling suddenly afraid, he hurried back inside to find his wife.
Marianna was in the morning room, examining packets of seeds. Two whippets lay beside her on the sofa, wrapped against the cold in a mass of darkly coloured shawls so that only the black matt tips of their noses were visible above the rise and fall of the cloth. Wolf stood over her and let the telegram flutter down into her lap. It was light and grimy and Marianna turned to ash as she picked it up and held it in her hands. ‘Let me,’ he said then, regretting his cowardice. But to his relief she kept hold of it, swinging away out of his reach to break the seal herself.
The news at first lifted them both on a wave of relief and they sank against each other in a half embrace, Wolf dropping to the floor to catch his wife as she rocked forwards. They had hardly taken in this news when the sound of hurrying feet drew them apart, and the sight of Bina, her face flushed, her eyes fierce and questioning, brought them to their feet. The two dogs lifted their heads, stretched their straight legs and sighed at the disturbance. The telegram’s arrival had spread with great rapidity up from the back door. News of it came through into the kitchens with the empty water cup and was passed, whispering over hatches along the dark maze of downstairs corridors. It spread hurriedly up into the servants’ quarters, round the wooden rooms, from where Dolfi carried it through into the nursery with the linen. Bina assumed, from the relieved expression of her mother’s face, that the news was wholly good. ‘Let me,’ she said, reaching for the paper, and as she read, her face became suffused with fury. Her mouth hung open in a small round gasp and her eyes blazed with outrage. Martha and Eva rushed into the room, and she turned and clasped them in her arms, spluttering out the terrible news before Marianna had a chance to get to them.
‘What is it?’ Fräulein Schulze was standing in the door, her red hair pulled severely off her face, her freckles standing out against her whitening skin. ‘It’s Manu.’ Bina looked up, holding out a hand to her. ‘He’s . . .’ But the governess did not wait to hear. A strange noise was gurgling in her throat and, hunching her shoulders to her neck, she turned and hurried from the room.
‘Schu-Schu?’ Eva called. ‘Schu?’ Having searched through every room, she sat down, exhausted, on the floor. ‘This is my room and I love it,’ she whispered, and, glancing guiltily into the corner, she thought she could still see a tiny dent under the smooth line of the redecoration. She turned around to peer between the dark legs of her bed. At first she could see nothing, and her heart began to pound as she ran her fingers up and along the wooden under-slats of the frame to find her box. She had hung it like a hammock, fastening it with loops of string that stretched between the boards so that it could only be reached by lifting up the mattress. Eva put her fingers round it and eased it from its cradle, lowering it like treasure to the floor and finally bringing it up to sit on the white cover of her bed. She turned the key, which rested in its lock, and let the lid fall back to reveal her initials roughly carved between the hinges. And there they were, the paper words, curled for safety in a thimble. Eva spread them across her knee and then, raising the strip of paper to her lips, she kissed them. Next she lifted out her photograph of Schu-Schu, her freckles spilling out in sepia dots against the brown tones of the image. ‘1911. Neuenahr’ was scrawled in thin brown ink on the back, and Eva could still see her governess standing on the promenade, her hat in her hand, her head held high, while Emanuel took his time clicking and whirring with the shutter. Eva looked into her pale eyes and saw a faint glimmer of amusement in the familiar stare. At the very bottom of the box, under dusty skeins of coloured silk, she found the childish note, smudged with dried brown blood and dictated to Emanuel when she was seven years old. It swore that when she had grown up and reached sixteen, her only brother Emanuel would take her off to live with him and never, ever have another friend. At the bottom, by an oversized full-stop, the print of their two thumbs was smudged, Eva’s small and oval, and Emanuel’s too large for the one drop of blood so that the pattern of it faded to one side and slipped, transparent, off the page.
That night Fräulein Schulze did not appear for supper. ‘How extraordinary,’ Marianna said, and for once her daughters had to agree. They sat in dismal silence over a casserole of rabbit, the boiled bones sticking up out of the stew. Omi Lise tried her hardest to keep up some conversation, but the house seemed suddenly too big, shadows seeping in from disused rooms and the weight of the great ceiling pressing down on them.
That night Eva lay awake, waiting for the sound of Schu’s large feet treading the back stairs. She imagined her out in the garden, wrapped up in her coat and sauntering in pure fury up and down the hill. ‘Martha?’ she whispered, and hearing nothing from her sister but the slow hush of her breath, she slid over to the window. It was dark, with a low-lying cloudy sky that blotted out the stars. Eva pressed her face against the glass, screwing up her eyes, but could still see nothing beyond the ice-house path. Shivering she got back into bed where, unable to sleep, she conjured up a new image for herself: her governess sitting warm in the long maze of the kitchens, talking over this important day with Gruber, Dolfi and their Gaglow cook.
It wasn’t until the following morning that Bina found Schu’s letter. It had been posted between the sheets, and pushed down so far that, curled up against cold linen, she didn’t come across it until she woke. With a final morning stretch she nudged her feet into the outer reaches of the bed and there, between her toes, she caught the blunt edge of the envelope. She screamed and dived down to retrieve it. By the time she’d torn out the letter her sisters had collected round her.
‘What is it?’ Martha asked, and Bina stretched the letter out over the pillow. It reminded Eva of a will, the last and final testament, and she shivered as she knelt with Martha on the quilt. ‘Do not forget what I have taught you.’ The letter addressed them formally and was laid out in brown ink on thick white paper. ‘Do not forget.’ And there followed a rather disappointing list of hair-brushing, nail-scrubbing, neck-washing, and at what angle to hold one’s head for poise, beauty and maximum effect. But at the very bottom of the paper their governess set out her most fervent wish that they listen carefully at all times to what their mother might be telling them. ‘To be warned from within the heart of your own family of the evils of frivolity, the dangers of shallow feeling and of trapping a man of whom you are not worthy.’ Bina read this last phrase twice in a low, gravelly voice, so that only the word ‘evils’ sprang out and cleared itself. Martha and Eva tugged at the cold end of the quilt and pressed their toes together.
Bina fixed them with a frown and began to read the letter again. ‘Bina,’ they complained, but she made them swear never to forget by twisting their fingers childishly in a cat’s cradle of her own devising. In her room across the hall Nanny coughed, and in a sudden fit of terror Eva and Martha leapt from their nest at the bottom of Bina’s bed and scurried back across the room.
‘But where could she have gone?’ they asked their father. ‘Where could Schu have gone?’ And he answered calmly that, in these uncertain times, she must have felt the need to return to her own family. Eva looked anxiously around. How many times had Fräulein Schulze told them it was they who were her family? ‘My blood and guts,’ she whispered, when they pleased her. ‘My only girls.’
‘In no time at all we’ll find she’s back.’ Marianna smiled, and realized to her surprise that she hoped it might be true.
As the days passed with no more news, Bina became convinced that Schu-Schu had been sacked. ‘It was the perfect moment to get rid of her, don’t you understand?’
Martha shook her head uneasily, and Eva chewed her lip. ‘Not really.’
‘Now Manu’s not here to fight for her, to get her back.’ They thought of him, imprisoned by the Russians, not even knowing that Fräulein Schulze was gone. ‘After all, he made Mama get her back before.’
‘Yes.’ Eva frowned. She’d been too young to remember, but she still knew, from Bina telling her, that it was all her fault.
Bina put her finger to her lips. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ her eyes made a quick dart across the floor, ‘it’s possible Mama may know where Schu is. She might even have a letter with her address. A letter to us, one that she never had the decency to pass on.’
Eva found herself doubting this last claim. But then the thought excited her of creeping through her mother’s cupboards, rummaging in drawers and letting the silkiness of pearls and amber lie against her palm.
‘And if we find Schu-Schu’s address, she might, it’s just possible, she might know how to get Manu released.’
‘With bribes?’ Martha screwed up her face.
And Bina, her eyes fierce: ‘With whatever it takes.’
‘But whatever happens,’ Martha argued, ‘the Russians will let him out when the war ends, surely.’
Bina put an arm round her shoulder and drew her sister’s face close in to hers. ‘Typhoid, lice, starvation, torture,’ she whispered. ‘Does it never occur to you to read a newspaper? Yes, they’ll let him out. If he’s still alive.’ And she released her hold.
‘Then what if the war never ends?’ Martha added, twisting round the argument to regain her pride. And she widened her eyes to register her point.
The three girls sat in silence. They could hear Omi Lise moving crookedly about next door. It was her sudden descent into old age that highlighted more than anything that they were beginning to outgrow their nursery. A warm streak of sunlight lay across the floor and through the door stood their three beds, neatly folded and made up.
‘In normal times, I suppose I might be married by now.’ Bina laughed, and they continued to sit in silence, wondering at the left fork of their lives, the waste of their unanswered prayers, and the hours and hours of waiting time.
‘Julika is engaged to an officer,’ Martha said, and then immediately regretted it. ‘But not Jewish,’ she added quickly. ‘And Angelika has no one.’
It was a week before Emanuel’s last letter arrived. It lay unopened on the breakfast table, waiting by Marianna’s plate and as Eva looked at it she felt hot blood roaring in her ears. She did not want to hear her brother’s old, old news, and shrank away from catching him in the humiliating act of knowing less than them.
In a strange, low voice her mother read, ‘“The snows are finally starting to melt, and for the first time in six months I am able to get about without the use of a sled.”’ Marianna’s fingers trembled at the bottom of the page, but she’d made her decision and was sticking to it. ‘“I have orders to ride out tonight to where the leader of the regiment has spent the entire winter playing cards with his toes toasting by an open fire. Even my poor bored horse is longing for the challenge to negotiate the way by moonlight. We shall be careful as always to avoid the thinning ice and stick like shadows to the shelter of the woods. When I whispered the news into my horse’s ear I could swear she snorted that there is nothing she would like more than to embark on this small adventure . . . ”’ Eva clasped her fingers painfully together. ‘It is still only afternoon,’ Marianna continued, ‘but the moon has already risen in the sky and is hanging there larger than seems normal. I shall take this as a good sign whether it is one or not . . .’ Unable to bear it for a moment longer, Eva shook herself and, with a half-intended thrust, jolted Martha’s elbow as she raised cold acorn coffee to her lips. Martha cried out as the liquid splashed across her dress and the whole table used the moment as an excuse to put the letter to one side, distracting themselves with an unnatural bustle.