Authors: Esther Freud
Bina had decided to become a nurse. Eva lay with her on the cool floor of the Gaglow nursery, leafing through her practical guide. There were illustrations of white-aproned women, serene and smiling, carrying basins of water over to the bedsides of lightly wounded men. The soldiers all had gleaming bandages wound around their heads, or arms slung in sashes to hold up splinted elbows, and they were all without exception startlingly handsome. Eva leant across her sister’s shoulder and examined their illustrated features, the unshaven chins and pencilled hollows of their cheeks, the strong shoulders, the bright, polite eyes. She found, as the pages turned, that she was holding her breath for Manu. ‘Bina, will you be sent off to the front line, to a field hospital?’ she asked.
Bina flicked through to the end with irritation. ‘There is all this to learn first. There are thousands of experienced nurses just waiting to get to the front. Anyway, I’m only an untrained volunteer, anyone could do it.’ And she smiled and shot a look at Eva, knowing that this was not entirely true.
‘Well, I expect the war will probably be over by the time you’ve learnt the first thing about it,’ Eva responded, and she picked up the discarded letter. They had to have a letter ready to send Schu-Schu, Bina insisted, for when they located her address. Eva read slowly through the words, aware that any criticism would not be welcome. It struck her how closely Bina had picked up their governess’s own tone, with lists of reasons and lightly veiled threats of what was due and owed. She shivered. Schu, she thought, Schu-Schu-Schu, and she closed her eyes, immersed in an instant by the huge enveloping of her arms, the memory of how it felt to arrive home to a house that existed completely and without rivalry for them.
‘As soon as we get back to Berlin,’ Bina lowered her voice, ‘we’ll start the search again. You and Martha might have to begin without me after school, but as soon as I’ve amputated a leg or two and siphoned off some poison, I’ll be home to join you.’ She made a gruesome face and they both laughed, shivering and gleeful, so that when Martha called to them from the next room they jumped in shock, then, catching at each other’s hands, rolled over on the floor with helpless shrieks of laughter.
Martha called again, a real, terrifying shout for help, and Bina and Eva, their blood falling away, scrambled to their feet.
‘It’s Omi Lise,’ Martha choked, and there, bent against her bed as if in prayer, was the stiff, hunched body of their nanny. The three girls approached her slowly. ‘Omi?’ Martha whispered, and when she didn’t answer they all bent down and Eva touched her hand. ‘She’s still warm.’
A tiny straining voice rose from the bedclothes. ‘Of course I’m still warm. You won’t get rid of me that easily.’ And Martha’s face flooded with colour, her tears falling onto the old woman’s bony head.
‘Let’s try and move her,’ Bina said, her few medical weeks assuming new importance, and between them they lifted her light, brittle body and laid her on the bed. ‘Fetch some water,’ Bina ordered, and Martha brought a glass and rested it against her lips. Eva slipped her arm behind Nanny’s head. She took a tiny sip and lay back exhausted on the pillows.
‘I think we should look after her ourselves. Up here.’
Martha and Eva both froze with the force of Bina’s words. ‘Omi,’ Martha leant back over her, ‘how are you feeling?’ But Omi Lise seemed too stunned to move her lips.
‘They’ll miss her at supper,’ Eva said.
Bina shook her off. ‘We’ll send down a message for a tray and then offer to bring it up to her ourselves.’
‘No,’ Eva said. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked into the creased and funnelled face. ‘She wouldn’t like there to be any lies.’ But Bina glared at her with such determination that she found herself slipping limply into line.
‘Can we get you something from downstairs?’ Martha asked. Nanny’s eyelids fluttered and then lay still as if she had worn too thin to tell them one more time what they should do.
The gong for supper sounded, and Omi Lise, when they left her, seemed to have fallen into a light and even sleep. ‘She may be herself again tomorrow,’ Bina said. ‘She probably just needs a bit of rest.’ But they walked down the wide wooden staircase without the usual clatter, trailing into the dining room with dark, preoccupied eyes.
Bina, Martha and Eva kept an all-night vigil by the side of Omi Lise’s bed.
‘She doesn’t seem to have a temperature.’ Martha placed a light hand on her forehead.
Bina jerked away her arm. ‘Of course she hasn’t got a temperature. She’s not ill. She’s just exhausted.’ And Eva lifted up a fork of delicately prepared rice and held it, hopelessly, close to her lips.
The three girls sat in silence as the night wore on, watching for the dawn, which spread darkly red and earlier than they would have thought. With the light of a new day, Nanny’s face had turned as old as parchment. ‘What age is she, do you think?’ Martha asked, and they spent the slow hours trying to untangle it.
‘We could carry her down to sit out in the sun,’ Bina pondered, once they’d given up on the multiplication, and they all leant forward to check the cool flow of blood still running in her veins. Nanny’s face was traced with green, and her hair was the faded colour of a primrose.
‘I think she might like some porridge,’ Eva said. ‘Would you, Omi dear?’ And to avoid suspicion they all went down to breakfast.
‘Dolfi, could you ask Cook to make an extra bowl of porridge?’ Eva caught her mother’s lowered look, and to lessen the improbability of the request, called after her, ‘With extra milk.’
The porridge sat congealing at her elbow as she scraped the lining from a precious hard-boiled egg. Bina and Martha had slipped away, and she was only waiting for her mother to rise and leave the table.
She began to spoon the food in a ring around the edge. Marianna looked over at her. ‘What are we to do?’ She shook her head and, without waiting for an answer, folded up her napkin and left the room. Eva watched her mother’s shadow disappear from the doorway then, covering the dish of porridge, she pushed back her chair and ran out into the hall. She slowed on the stairs, in an effort not to slop the milk, and paused for breath on the second landing.
‘Eva.’ She heard her name hissed, urgent, from above and, rushing, she hit her foot on a step and the silver spoon resting in the bowl jolted out and rattled down the stairs. ‘That is too much,’ she muttered, using Omi’s own disapproving phrase, and setting the dish on a step she ran back to retrieve it.
‘Eva?’ Her mother was in front of her, the bowl in her hand. ‘What are you doing, rushing your breakfast round the house?’ Eva looked past her, up through the twist of banisters to the round circle of the top floor. Tears came to her eyes and, without intending it, she pushed the spoon into her mouth for comfort. ‘Are you hiding someone hungry in the nursery?’ Marianna asked, amused, then the corners of her mouth turned down and the colour drained out of her face. She dropped the bowl, hitched up her skirts and sped up the last flight. Eva stared down at the gluey mass of porridge, jagged with bone china. She sat on the bottom step, her toes stained with little strings of oatmeal, and waited for her mother to come back down.
*
Wolf Belgard found the countryside oppressive, all the space and time that hung so heavily and the landscape empty of the men who worked it. There was no sense in it, but he found the war easier to forget while in Berlin, even with the air-ships floating high above the city and the bands of children with their banners raising private loans to subsidize the war. He wandered round the evening streets. Shops were shutting up and cafés, which had half-heartedly stretched out to catch the sun, were being tucked behind their double folding doors. There was a subdued air of calm and disillusion. A little crowd of women, all in black, stood miserably before a stand where the latest lists of soldiers killed in action had been pasted. There was talk, he knew, of banning the public display of such information, prompted by concern that the conversations resulting from these daily lists of losses, sheet after double sheet of tiny jumping names, led to unpatriotic and defeatist comments.
Wolf stopped and looked about him, trying to re-create the jubilant faces of the crowd who had, on the day that Britain turned on them to declare war, rushed through the streets, hissing and spitting and holding up their fists. He had been swept along himself, rushed about and caught up in the current, and had found himself one of many thousand, bursting with indignation before the closely guarded British embassy.
He had seen a man, professional and well dressed, jump on to the running board of an official car and, leaning past the chauffeur strike the passenger full in the face with his hat. The man, scarlet and trembling with rage, had shouted, still clutching at his eye, that he was not British but American. On hearing this his assailant had apologized, replaced his hat and offered him his card. It was claimed afterwards in the papers that pennies had been tossed from the windows of the British embassy to humiliate the crowd, and in retaliation the people had shattered every pane of glass. But Wolf had not seen any coins. Stones had certainly been thrown and the splintering and cracking had been accompanied by cheers and shouts, growls and sighs of satisfaction. Wolf had himself felt overwhelmed with the desire to join them. He began to scuffle with his feet, peering for pebbles between the legs of the spectators, and found to his surprise that the square in which they stood was paved with asphalt. ‘Pfui, pfui!’ hissed a thousand contemptuous mouths and, ashamed of it as he was now, he had opened his own mouth and felt the warm snake of solidarity hiss out. ‘Pfui!’ He allowed himself, in a surge of hot blood, to be jostled on to Unter den Linden to stand declaiming outside a hotel known to harbour foreign journalists.
Wolf stopped and looked about him. The streets were virtually deserted, and it made him sweat when he considered with what fickleness he had behaved. It must have been his childish wonder at being in the centre of a crowd that had distracted him from memories of other gatherings, made up as they were of these same people. He had chosen to forget the hostile group who, in the first year of his marriage, had taunted him, hissing and spitting and goading each other on. Marianna, pregnant with their first child, had asked him to escort her on a walk. It was early evening and Wolf had returned from work to find her upset by a lurid article in that day’s paper. It was the story of a five-year-old boy, Emanuel Goldbacher, found with his throat cut on the banks of the river Rhine. The reports suggested it had been a ritualistic murder and, with no evidence against him, a Jewish butcher and his family had been taken from their home and locked up in the local prison. Wolf had folded his wife’s arm in his, and attempted to soothe her with more cheerful conversation as they walked towards the Tiergarten.
It was a favourite pastime to saunter past the house in which they’d met, to look up, smiling, at the windows as if they might just catch the innocent shadows of the people they had been. They had almost reached the gates, absorbed in a teasing game of idiotic name suggestions for the baby, when a fat globule of spit sailed across Wolf’s shoulder and landed on his shoe.
They stopped, still entwined and looked behind them. A crowd had gathered, up to twenty men and women whispering and muttering. A woman pushed her way to the front and, puckering her mouth, prepared to spit again. In an instant Marianna withdrew her arm from his and pulled her coat about her. She advanced upon the woman with such speed and strength of purpose that the other was forced to gulp down her attack and step back onto the ankle of a man, who swore and fell against another woman, who struck him round the head. Marianna opened her mouth wide, exposing the pink and pearly gum above her teeth and laughed at them. The hisses died away, and Wolf, in the fraction of ensuing silence, took his wife’s arm and walked briskly with her through the gates into the park.
‘We shall call our boy Emanuel,’ she said, after half an hour of silence. And although Wolf did not entirely agree with this choice of name for his first son, he looked fondly at his wife and put up no resistance.
Eva knew before she reached the nursery that Omi Lise was dead. It was the silence that wound down to her, and through the open door she could see their nanny lying where they’d left her before breakfast. Her head propped up on pillows, her hair tapering like wax across the sheet.
Eva watched her mother as she leant against the bed. Her eyes were not fixed, as she had expected them to be, on Omi’s setting face but on Bina, who was crouching pale as a statue by the door. Bina’s lips were white and thin, and as Eva tiptoed in her sister shot her an appealing glance. Eva turned away and knelt down by the bed. She blinked and wiped her eyes, and in a horrible transformation she saw Emanuel, his arm bound up, his forehead cold and clammy from his fever.
‘Hadn’t we better get the doctor?’ she had asked.
‘Yes, call the doctor,’ Bina and Martha had agreed.
But Schu-Schu had shaken them off, ordering instead basins of hot water and bowls of disinfectant. She cleaned the wound carefully and dressed it, bound up the poisoned arm with skilful fingers, and mumbled prayers in her own south German drawl. She organized Schwabish songs in rounds and through two days and nights she set up a rota of willing hands to cool Emanuel’s neck and forehead with cold compresses of her own devising.
And then, almost a week early, their mother returned from Rome. ‘Bitten by a dog?’ She reared up on the doorstep and, knocking strings of flowers and iced flannels to the floor, she had fallen on Emanuel. ‘We wanted to look after him ourselves, isn’t that right?’ The governess attempted to explain the absence of the doctor, appealing to the three girls for their support. But Emanuel had saved her by opening his eyes, stretching his healing arm above his head and insisting he was cured.
Eva knelt down and touched the fingers of Omi’s clasped hands. The difference was that Manu had been saved. Omi’s hands were cold and, as she pulled away, she heard Bina shuffle to her feet. ‘We wanted to look after her ourselves, that was all . . .’