Authors: Esther Freud
Marianna heard a rustle in the corridor and quickly replaced the pages, stacked in the right order, in the drawer. She twisted the key and slipped it under the blotting paper where its small, irregular shape had given it away. Then to cover her short breath, she plumped up the pillows on the bed and folded back a corner of his sheet. She took a last glance at the desk to see that everything was in order, and stepped out into the hall. A murmur of voices drifted through from the kitchen where the cook clattered about, passing on licentious stories about the family for whom she used to work, enjoying the sight of Dolfi, the maid, blushing and covering her mouth, and knowing that on her first day off Dolfi would pass them on to her sister who also worked as a maid.
Wolf lounged on the divan, soothed by the nightly unpinning of Marianna’s hair. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ he asked, caught by her slow movements and her arms frozen in the air above her head.
‘Yes.’ She smiled, starting. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’
Wolf raised himself so that he could see his own reflection in the triple-sided mirror. He was watchful, since his daughters’ births, for any signs of melancholy. ‘You need a change of scene,’ he told her, and before he had time to promise her an afternoon of walking in the countryside she turned to him and suggested they make a trip to Italy.
‘You can’t deny that the Schulze has the children under tight control.’ Wolf, delighted by this joke against herself, found he had agreed.
‘We shall go as far as Rome,’ she said, and he came and sat beside her, pushing her along the upholstered seat so that he had to catch her quickly round the waist to stop her slipping off.
Italy had been the chosen destination of their honeymoon and they had always promised to return. They had travelled to Lucerne and then on to Milan where the white marble cathedral had reminded them of a cake shop in Berlin. This confession, shyly given, had drawn them so warmly together that, even though it had been February, Marianna still remembered Milan as a city of blue skies and flowering avenues of trees. From there they had travelled to Genoa with its narrow lanes and high white roads up above the sea. They stayed in a small hotel, recommended for its French chef, where all the other guests smiled and nodded to each other whenever they came into the dining room. ‘Oh, no, we’ve been married well over a year!’ Marianna protested when they offered their congratulations, but she could tell that not one of them believed her.
A week before they were due to leave for Italy, Marianna and Wolf were invited to a party at the house in the Tiergarten Strasse where they had first met. Marianna was taken in to dinner by the director of the German Bank. ‘When you are in Rome,’ he told her, ‘you must not miss paying a visit to the Pope.’ Marianna laughed, but he insisted that if she left her card with the Prussian Consul at the Vatican, she would most likely get an audience. He had done the same thing the year before. ‘Make sure you have a black silk dress, and that your husband has a dinner jacket.’
On their first Sunday in Rome, Wolf and Marianna drove to the house of the Ambassador and left their card. ‘Don’t expect to hear another thing about it,’ Wolf warned, but three days later they received an invitation, gold-embossed and at the request of His Holiness the Pope.
Marianna bought a square of black lace to cover her head, as the invitation instructed, and Wolf dressed in his evening suit. At the appointed time they took a taxi to the Vatican. ‘Look at all those Roman Catholics,’ Marianna whispered, as two women wearing identical lace squares over their hair stepped down from a carriage.
Wolf pinched her. ‘Shhh, I know those people. They are the Goldsteins from Charlottenberg.’ But before they could call out to them, a guard in gold-embroidered uniform helped them down and escorted them to their appointed place in the Pope’s private rooms, where he left them standing under a painting of the finding of Moses.
Clerics in robes of blue, green and purple silk filed through the room and it was announced that when His Holiness passed by, the assembled company should drop to their knees and be ready to kiss the Fisherman’s Ring of St Peter. Shortly afterwards the Pope himself appeared. He was dressed in snowy, glinting white and made the sign of the Cross before holding out his hand for the kiss, over which no one was meant to linger for more than a second. Marianna’s neighbour, a French woman with a stricken face, detained him with a long lament about her sick son. ‘Pray to the Good Lord,’ he told her, but she snapped back that she’d already done that and with very little success. Either he couldn’t understand her quickly spoken French, or he simply did not want to prolong the conversation, Marianna wasn’t sure, but he moved on with only a mumbled response in Italian, which the woman couldn’t understand. Marianna kissed the air above his ring and let him pass.
‘Well, how about that?’ Wolf laughed, when afterwards they sat with the Goldsteins in a trattoria by the Spanish Steps, and toasted with red wine to a more enlightened future where all religions might happily overlap. Marianna raised her glass and thought of the sick son left all alone while his mother made her pilgrimage from France. She let the rich red wine warm her and found her heart lifted by thoughts of her own children, healthily at home, even if, for this one month, there had been no alternative but to leave them under the supervision of Gabrielle Schulze.
It was only on their return from Italy that the Belgards learnt of the unlikely gift of Gaglow. For three generations the estate had been owned by the family of Hans Dieter, who over the years had amassed a small fortune in unpaid debts. Wolf had supplied him with grain on credit for four consecutive seasons, never doubting he would pay up, but Hans Dieter’s gambling finally caught him up and ruined him and, to avoid official bankruptcy, he began distributing his assets. ‘Take the house as payment,’ he offered, ‘the stables that go with it, the carriages . . .’ and here he blushed, stumbling over himself, ‘and also the fields that stretch down to the village.’
Wolf was unsure. ‘Why shouldn’t we accept the land?’ Marianna insisted when he told her, sitting at her dressing table, skimming the waves of her hair. ‘We should say no because we are Jews?’ And she’d laughed a joyful laugh that stayed with him for several days.
Wolf and Marianna drove out to Gaglow, leaving one morning just as dawn was breaking. It was a journey of three hours, and Wolf, who had travelled on this road before, pointed out sights, ancient, black-beamed inns that sloped to one side, and a tree that had been struck by lightning.
Hans Dieter was not a married man and had only used the estate for summer shooting and the entertainment of his friends. It had a grey, abandoned look, but Marianna still gasped at the beauty of the house as they drove up the straight, steep drive. ‘You didn’t tell me it was on a hill.’
She turned to her husband, who smiled at her enthusiasm and shrugged. ‘Does it make a difference?’
They wandered around the overgrown and meadowy lawns and looked down on every side at the farms with their neatly planted fields stretching out below. The house looked severe and dark, with nothing behind it but sky, and Marianna began to plan how she would plant vines along its walls and edge the cold stone window-sills with flowers.
Hans Dieter had driven out to join them. The moment Marianna saw him she could tell that he was eaten up with prejudice. He was straight and civil with her husband, but at her he glanced sideways, his eyes full of undisguised disgust. Marianna felt herself looked over, up and down, as if she were a foreigner. It made her even more determined to accept the house, and she met his gaze straight on and without pretending to return the cold smile in his eyes.
‘He’s a decent enough fellow, for all his weakness,’ Wolf said, once they were alone, and Marianna pressed his arm, and told him tenderly that he was too good and stupid for this world.
Hans Dieter had shown them round the house, through the west wing of drawing rooms and out into the courtyard. The kitchens, he explained, were at the back and were so far from the dining room that holes had been knocked in several walls to allow the food to be passed through to servants posted in the corridors. In that way, meals had more chance of reaching the table while still hot. Hans Dieter ushered them upstairs and walked with them through the deserted nurseries, even allowing them to peer into his own private rooms where Marianna saw a bed draped with pelts, tails and claws still attached and hanging like the fringes of an eiderdown. She clenched her teeth and refused to allow the colour to rise in her face. She walked back down the wide, curved staircase, calling over her shoulder that she preferred to be outside.
The orchard was red and green with early apples and pungent with the unpicked fruit of the year before. The earth squelched and gave under Marianna’s boots. She raised her arms and, clasping a flaking branch, hung from it, allowing her feet to leave the ground and swing gently through the grass. She picked a small hard apple and put it in her pocket. Then she walked round to the back of the house and let herself into the vegetable garden. It was overgrown and for years had been used only by the servants. A dark, gloomy fig tree spread against one wall, impossible to reach for weeds and brambles, and another wall bore the dried traces of vines and one surviving apricot. Only a long strip of the garden had been kept up and this was planted out with row after row of cabbages and potatoes.
Wolf stood in the doorway and called to her. He laughed as she strode across to him, her leather boots caked in mud, her palms moss green with lichen. ‘It looks to me as if you’ve already made your decision,’ he said, and he took her arm and led her back to the front door of the house where he had forms, already drafted, for Hans Dieter to sign.
Wolf and Marianna spent that night at an inn in the town. Word had spread that they were the new owners of Gaglow and they were greeted with unreserved curiosity and made to wait a long time for their supper.
‘The children will love it here,’ Wolf said, and Marianna smiled and thought of Emanuel in years to come. ‘The girls particularly,’ he added, winking, and he clinked her glass with his.
Eva, Martha and Bina watched the flushed face of their mother as she broke the news to them. They saw the light in her eyes and the plans for grandeur twitching at her fingers. To spite her they remained unmoved. ‘It sounds distinctly feudal,’ Bina said. ‘I shan’t go there unless I have to.’ And in solidarity her sisters both agreed.
Bina was ten. She sat up in the dark bedroom of their Berlin apartment and wondered aloud what could have happened to the poor little Dieter children, now that they had been turned out of their own home.
‘But Papa would never have allowed that.’ Martha was appalled.
‘No,’ Bina agreed. ‘Papa couldn’t know.’
‘Do you mean she tricked him?’ Eva asked.
And Bina whispered solemnly that she had. ‘Schu-Schu says,’ she continued, lowering her voice, ‘that our mother has got far above herself.’ Eva and Martha looked at her, unsure exactly what she meant, but convinced of the necessary depth of the outrage. ‘Now you know,’ Bina said, and having sworn not to be won over, they traipsed back to their own beds.
When Eva first saw the house, with painters swinging from the window-sills and gardeners pushing back and forth across the grass, she felt an urge to run off round it, dragging her fingers over the texture of the walls and exploring ledges and secret steps that were warmed at angles by the sun, but she caught sight of Fräulein standing, looking dismissively around. ‘Just as I expected,’ she seemed to be saying. And Eva stayed standing where she was.
The girls walked in an orderly fashion around the house. Bina kept up a mournful appearance, casting reproachful glances at her sisters when the length of a corridor or the man-sized tunnel of a chimney carried them away. Martha became engrossed by the winding maze of the kitchens and Bina was forced to start nodding like an old lady, muttering, ‘How will they eat now, the little Dieter children, wandering the streets?’
When both Bina and Martha disappeared into an enormous pantry, Eva seized her chance and slipped up a flight of narrow stairs. She found herself on the first floor, and began walking from room to room, catching rising voices from the ballroom where her mother was ordering drapes and covers and replacements for the missing fragments of a chandelier. Eva continued up the main staircase and found herself in the nursery. She recognized the low white ceiling and the double row of sky blue windows, exactly as her mother had described. One night Eva had lain with her ears muffled by a pillow, while Marianna tried to breathe into her the spirit of the house. She had whispered about swallows and apple blossom, and the fountain, frozen in the winter, but Eva burrowed her head deeper down into the bed and forced her eyes closed with images of tangled forests, wolves, and Hansel and Gretel searching desperately for crumbs.
Eva took off her shoes and slid along the corridor from one room to the next. The floor had been planed and polished so that it felt as smooth as butter, and in each room was a large white fireplace and a row of high windows. In the farthest room, down by the skirting board, a faded, childish hand had written, ‘This is my room and I love it.’
Eva knelt down to inspect the message. She imagined it might have been left there by one of Hans Dieter’s children, or Dieter himself, or if, as Bina had told her, the family had lived in this house for hundreds of years, it might even have been his grandfather when he was a small boy. Eva wanted to cover up the message and keep it for herself. She looked around and, finding nothing in the unfurnished room with which to guard it, she peeled off the paper words and put them in her pocket in a strip, leaving a narrow length of exposed plaster underneath.
‘I’ve had another letter,’ my father said, ‘about the property.’ He waved it in front of me, and for a moment I was surprised to see it was in German.
‘Does it mention the theatre?’ I asked, lumbering towards the sofa, fully clothed.
He peered over it, his glasses on his nose, translating as he read. ‘“The descendants of the daughters of Marianna Belgard . . . are entitled . . . but only on agreement of a set commission.” Oh, he’s come down to forty per cent.’ And he moved gleefully over to the easel.