Authors: Esther Freud
‘You will have to be an only child like me,’ she crooned over her son, and she thought of what her father called ‘the holy trinity’ of her own small family. And then, one after another, her daughters had been born.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Martha asked, and Marianna wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.
She considered telling them something about the life of an only child, its loneliness and quiet, but found herself remembering her friend the curtain mender who came regularly to help her mother. ‘I was thinking,’ she told Martha, ‘about a very old woman and how whenever she reached the most exciting moment of a story, she began to stutter.’
‘How very tiresome.’ Bina raised her eyes.
‘Not at all. She used to let me cut out flowers to pin onto the cloth . . .’ But Martha was whispering some secret into Eva’s ear, and Bina, rather than listen to her mother, was trying to overhear what they were saying.
Marianna sent off to her aunt Cornelia for the recipe of Tree Cake. Tree Cake had been her own favourite childhood treat. It was an exotic cake, layered in rings around a hollow trunk, with flakes of chocolate to look like bark, and to prise the recipe from her aunt was the hardest task she could set herself on Emanuel’s behalf. Another aunt had been obsessed with cleanliness, wiping the handles of doors her guests had passed through, and dusting off the seats of their chairs, but Aunt Cornelia had kept the recipe for Tree Cake all to herself and moulded an identity around the mystique of its ingredients.
Dear, dear Manu,
Eva wrote before he’d hardly had a chance to get away.
I’ve been going over our plans for the future, and do you think, when the time comes to build our house we could make sure it’s near a forest? Maybe by now you’ve even seen the perfect place. I suppose the one good thing about you going off again so soon is that the more you travel the more opportunity you’ll have for finding the perfect spot.
Eva curved her elbow round the page to hide the letter from her sisters.
Please don’t forget I want a garden with a wooden fence around it and a broad summer tree with a fork in it for a hammock. I know you plan to have two good horses, one especially for Sunday and another with a mild temperament to ride around on during the week, but recently I’ve been wondering how I will get about. I’d have my bicycle, of course, but maybe we should consider a motorcar. We could keep it in a special wooden house and only ever use it when we visit the rest of the family, which I imagine, occasionally, we’ll have to do.
Eva looked round at the bent heads of her sisters. Sometimes the temptation to boast about her and Manu’s secret plans was more than she could bear.
‘What are you boring our poor brother with?’ Bina asked, leaning across to seize her page, and Eva, holding on to their promise, slipped the letter out of reach and sealed it in an envelope.
Bina wrote short notes to Emanuel describing the health and escapades of the various dogs and, sealed in its own envelope, she repeated the exact same news, with a doubling of passion, to be forwarded on to Josef Friedlander, who was serving in the same regiment.
Martha, who had fallen in love vicariously with Josef alongside Bina, added poems in French and then, unsure whether she was now writing in an enemy language, translated them painstakingly into German.
‘And what about Paris? For all the honeymoon couples?’ Martha asked one night, as her neck was being washed, and Schu-Schu promised that the war would never come between a girl and her wedding plans. She continued to insist upon this, even after the line was formed right across France to the sea, with the collected enemy lined up in trenches on the other side. She promised that a special path could be cleared across no man’s land to let the newly-weds through to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower.
Wolf returned to Gaglow for the first week of August, and as soon as he arrived the world declared war against each other like firecrackers catching. Russia, France and then Great Britain. They received a letter from Emanuel. He had been assigned to a cavalry regiment and was in daily training at a camp in Schleswig. ‘It seems,’ he wrote, ‘that it is the small things in this war that are going to prove most difficult, and the fact that we are burning to put our lives at risk will not be of much consequence.’ He went on to explain that, after a week strapped to the back of a horse, the lower half of his body was in such agony that he was virtually unable to sit down, stand up, or walk more than a few steps.
Marianna read the letter aloud, making her daughters blush and giggle. ‘“But, of course, our greatest problem is coming up with a plan to wean the horses off their favourite foods. They refuse everything except the choicest bread and pears, even though I tell them when they grumble that they must make sacrifices like everyone else, but I’m afraid they only snort with disapproval, turning up their noses – sorry, Papa – at the finest oats and barley.”’ Marianna smiled at her husband. It made her proud to think that grain passing almost through his hands was helping to support the German army.
‘My dear family,’ Emanuel wrote again from Schleswig, ‘It’s still uncertain when we set off. It is possible that we might not be fighting against the French and British, but against Indians and Japanese! How strange this will be, but I hasten to add it should not prevent us from winning.’
And when, in October, his regiment began to move into France, he wrote in a burst of enthusiasm: ‘Last night we slept out in the fields wrapped in our coats against the rain, and the morale of the men could not have been higher. There are forty-eight cavalry regiments lying here next to one another in an endless line of trenches. Lions, hussars, dragoons, cuirassiers. I have an overwhelming feeling that things will turn out for the best, even though the air is thick with cannonfire. It will be hard for you to imagine but no one takes much notice, and the only real complaints are about the food. Last night the bread was so thick and full of dough we all preferred to fast.’ Marianna broke off and looked towards her husband.
‘The Belgians,’ Wolf said, ‘disrupting rail links.’ He buried his head in his newspaper and refused to comment further.
‘Is there really nothing you can do?’ Marianna tried again.
Wolf closed his eyes and laid his hand over hers. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe,’ and the two deep lines above his nose merged together, shooting upwards in a thick furrow as he frowned.
Wolf Belgard was one of very few who was not behind the war. It is a blunder on a massive scale, he thought privately, and as he read his daily paper he shook his head to think that not one of these thousands of men, foot soldiers, officers or generals, had ever fired a single war-time shot.
Bina reached for Manu’s latest letter. She sped through the closely written words, unable to believe that once again her brother had failed to include any messages of hope for her from Josef Friedlander. ‘What can he be thinking of?’ She flung it away, and all at the long table turned to glare at her with a hard range of disapproving looks.
Martha took the letter. She touched the pages with her fingertips and began to cry quietly on to the paper. ‘Please just win,’ she whispered, and Eva, unable to sit by and see the precious words smudge and dissolve, eased it from her.
Eva read the letter through from beginning to end and still found little to satisfy her curiosity. Emanuel never mentioned the future or his plans for after the war. He only mentioned that he was being sent on somewhere else. By the time Eva had read the letter several times, searching for anything that might be construed as code, the breakfast dishes had been cleared and everyone else had left the table.
Fräulein Schulze put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Your sisters are waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Have you forgotten? There’s a trip planned to the forest.’ Eva, immediately distracted, jumped up and ran to find her hat. Gabrielle Schulze, left alone, slipped the letter back into its envelope and folded it away into the pocket of her dress.
*
Bina, Martha and Eva settled into the carriage with their mother and sat back while Gruber set the horses at a steady pace. They were going to a beauty spot where they planned to meet Frau Samson and her daughters. They had not seen Angelika or Julika since their visit to the Castle, but their names came up regularly in conversation, and Bina had begun a correspondence.
‘Do you know,’ Bina said now, her round face creasing up with envy, ‘that between them they’ve had seven proposals of marriage?’
‘I wonder who they’re saving themselves for.’ Martha smiled.
Bina snapped, ‘Well, they can’t both marry the same man.’
‘No, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting to,’ Martha added, and she grinned at her own cleverness in answering Bina back.
Eva, who sat opposite with her mother, turned away. I’d rather talk about the war than listen to any more of their nonsense. She tapped Gruber on the shoulder and asked after his nephew who was dug into a trench in France.
‘We’ve had no news of him for over two weeks,’ he answered.
‘Oh, we had a letter from Manu only today,’ Eva boasted, and sensing her mistake she lapsed into silence.
To pass the time Marianna offered to tell them about her own mother’s engagement. Bina screwed up her eyes in contemplation but Martha was unable to resist. ‘Please do, do tell us,’ she said. And Eva turned one ear towards her.
‘My mother,’ Marianna began, ‘a girl of seventeen, was sitting at the table with an enormous pile of socks and stockings.’ ‘How romantic.’ Bina sniggered, but Marianna continued, ‘She had only just begun to darn when there was a knock at the door. It was a cousin with her new husband. They had a carriage waiting and they planned to drive out to Französisch Buchholz. Mama was delighted, but her mother said that unfortunately she would not be able to go. She needed the stockings urgently, and there was no one who could darn stockings quite like her. So, Mama, usually very mild, insisted she should be allowed to go. She begged her mother, beseeched her, until finally, after nearly half an hour, she had no choice but to relent. The stockings were packed away and, having changed into her best dress, she stepped into the carriage. It was a beautiful summer’s day. The trees swayed in the breeze and the sky was blue without a single cloud.’ Marianna stopped for a moment to take in the faces of her daughters, captured for once in the full flow of her own interest.
‘Go on.’ Bina frowned.
‘Well, almost as soon as the party arrived they met up with some acquaintances, a couple who had also asked a friend to accompany them, and this friend turned out to be no one other . . .’ Marianna was triumphant ‘. . . no one other than my papa!’ It was as if she had somehow arranged the whole event herself.
‘Go on,’ Martha urged, an eager film of tears glinting in each eye.
‘Well,’ Marianna said more slowly, ‘they fell in love . . . immediately, the minute they set eyes on one another . . .’ She laughed, and Martha blinked, letting loose a drop of water on each cheek. ‘And the following day Papa came to the house where my mother lived and asked for permission to marry her. And so,’ Marianna folded her hands in her lap, ‘they became a couple.’
There was a silence in the carriage and Bina squinted disapprovingly. ‘Is that it?’
They were driving through thick woods along a track muffled by the first fall of leaves. The trees arched in places over their heads, splicing and covering them with branches of green shadow. Eva leant back in the carriage and looked up at the sky. ‘Without a single cloud,’ she murmured, and she began to count tiny wisps of white between the trees.
‘Please carry on,’ Martha urged, but Marianna shook her head, smiling and rearranging the fingers of each glove. She would have liked to go on, but she knew that their questions would inevitably lead to the sad fact of her father’s early death, and her mother’s subsequent decline. She would have preferred to tell them about her own meeting with their father, the flowers and dances and the romantic months of their engagement. She would describe for them the wedding feast, the roast gosling with new potatoes, the caviar and cucumber salad, but on this subject they refused to let her speak. She had no way of knowing that, with the help of Fräulein Schulze, they had devised their own history of her marriage. That she had been accepted entirely out of pity, and that a woman of higher sensibilities would never have allowed a man like Wolfgang Belgard to sacrifice himself for her.
It was late morning when they arrived. Frau Samson was already there with her daughters, more exquisite than ever in dresses of the palest pink with parasols to match. They set off to walk along the edge of the river. There was a narrow path dotted with jagged stones and in the distance the roar of a waterfall could be heard, crashing like an angry crowd. Angelika and Julika put up their shades, twisting them jauntily over their shoulders. Marianna and Frau Samson strode ahead.
‘Have you never seen the falls?’ Angelika asked, turning back to Bina. The path was so narrow in places they had to walk in single file.
‘No.’ Bina turned to Martha and Martha to Eva. Eva shrugged and stuck out her tongue. It amused her that the sun, which had shone so warmly earlier in the day, now continually disappeared behind a single fat grey cloud, which dodged and clung and followed the sun as if purposefully to make nonsense of the Samson parasols. But the sisters refused to take them down even when spray from the rushing stream sent shivers down their arms and their mother turned back to drape shawls over their shoulders.
The Belgard girls were dressed in white puffed-sleeved blouses and full polka-dot skirts. Bina swore it was the latest fashion, and she had had Schu-Schu pin up their hair in rolls that pulled back from their centre parting and twisted round the sides of their heads like harvest loaves. ‘My three little milkmaids,’ Marianna had exclaimed when the girls appeared at breakfast, and Bina told her it was the fashion of the Dolomites and that she’d read about it in a magazine.
The waterfall was ferocious. It fell into a black pool that frothed and spun under the rocks. Marianna and Frau Samson had reached it first and were leaning on a railing that was set up especially for sightseers. Their daughters joined them, and they stood, all gathered together, mesmerized by the hissing gargle of the water as it fell. ‘It is possible to climb right behind, and see it from the other side,’ Julika said, and she began to lead the way along a ledge of large damp stones that stretched into a cave.