‘Where?’
‘They crept into the barn this evening. They must have come in from the woods. Decided we were safe.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yep.’
‘Including the woman?’
‘Including her.’
They finished another bottle. Weiss stumbled to his feet.
‘Let’s go, Faber. Find out what they’re up to.’
‘Are you sure she’s there?’
‘She’s there, Faber.’
Faber turned to the other men.
‘Are you coming, Kraus? Kraft?’
‘We’ll have a look,’ said Kraus. ‘What harm?’
‘I’ll come too,’ said Gunkel. ‘Stretch my legs.’
‘Come on Kraft,’ said Weiss.
‘I’m fine here,’ he said.
They wore their boots, but left their coats and hats.
‘Faustmann?’ said Faber. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ll stay here.’
‘Why?’
‘Not my thing, Faber.’
‘Come on. We might need an interpreter.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Suit yourself.’
They picked up their guns and stepped outside, into moonlight and sparkling snow. They walked across the village, crashing into each other as they went, loudly hushing each other’s laughter. Weiss and Gunkel started to sing. Kraus told them to be quiet. They reached the barn and cocked their guns.
‘All right, boys,’ said Weiss. ‘Who’s first this time?’
‘It must be you, Faber,’ said Kraus. ‘Your wedding present from us.’
They pushed open the door and swung torch beams until they located the huddle of staring eyes. Faber saw her, her headscarf still on. He walked towards her, but then he turned away and went back into the snow. He returned to the house to sleep between Kraft and Faustmann, his wife’s hair and photograph pressed into his cheek.
12
Katharina leaned back into the soft black leather chair, took a magazine from the walnut coffee table and angled her legs to the left, her feet crossed at the ankles like those of the other women in the room, although their fur coats closed neatly across their chests. She flicked through the pages, scanning pictures of ball gowns, gas cookers and tips for the perfect family Christmas, listening to the near silence of the other women, the polite coughs, the low whispers to already quiet children.
The nurse opened the door across thick cream carpet.
‘Mrs Faber.’
Katharina did not lift her head. It was rude to stare. She turned onto a new page.
‘Mrs Faber, please.’
The other women’s coats had obviously been bought for them. She could tell. No straining at the buttons. She felt herself in shadow. It was the nurse. Standing over her.
‘Mrs Faber. Please. Dr Weinart is waiting for you.’
‘Oh. That’s me.’
‘I know it’s you.’
Katharina stood up, fumbling with her bag, coat and magazine, her face flushed. The women were staring at her. She hurried after the nurse, across a hall and into a room overlooking the city.
Dr Weinart rose as she entered.
‘Ah, Mrs Faber. The daughter of Mr Spinell and wife of Peter Faber.’
‘That is correct.’
‘Your father is a fine man. A very loyal supporter. I can assume the same of you?’
‘Of course, Doctor.’
‘Good. And your husband seems to be so, too. How is his campaign?’
‘I have not heard from him for several weeks, I’m afraid.’
‘He is a busy man, fighting for his country. It’s often hard to find time to write.’
‘That’s what my father tells me.’
‘Listen to your father.’
‘It is very kind of you to take me on, Dr Weinart.’
‘We can’t have our loyal supporters attending the son of a Jew.’
‘We didn’t know, Dr Weinart.’
‘He hid it well, Mrs Faber.’
‘Which of his parents was it?’
‘His mother. He fooled a lot of people, as they do. Now, how can I help you?’
They sat down on leather chairs on either side of a large mahogany table.
‘I am pregnant. At least, I think I am.’
‘That is very fine news. But it will take a couple of days to find out for certain.’
‘I see.’
‘I need a sample of your urine.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’
‘You understand why?’
‘I have read about it in the newspaper. It sounds very interesting, although a little hard to understand, I must admit.’
‘Great German science, Mrs Faber, is never simple.’
‘Could you explain it to me?’
‘I will inject your urine into a rabbit’s ear and the reaction of its ovaries will tell me whether you are pregnant.’
‘I see.’
‘The response of a female African clawed toad is much faster, Mrs Faber, but they are hard to come by at the moment.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Give the nurse your sample and come back to me on Friday. We will know the truth then.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’
She handed in her sample, and went back downstairs, onto the street, where the wind cut at her chest. She would have to find a new coat. And a stole. Preferably matching. She turned right along the
boulevard, glancing at coffee shops, looking for the one with the most customers and therefore the most supplies. She found one a couple of streets down from Dr Weinart. It was warm and quiet; the patrons were well-dressed, their heads buried in newspapers or books. They didn’t look up as she walked in. The waiter was polite but brisk, unwilling to linger.
She sat at a window and ordered hot chocolate. It was sweet, sugary rather than chocolatey, and the milk was thin, but it was hot and frothy. She wrapped her hands around the thick white porcelain. Pregnant, she would receive extra rations. Full fat, creamy milk.
She dropped her right hand to her belly. She knew he had taken hold. She didn’t need the rabbit. She could feel the growth, the frantic multiplication of cells, the sense of something other feeding on her. She rubbed her womb, her hand over the space where their baby was growing, wanting it, but afraid of it.
What if her husband was already dead? Or worse, injured. Those shadows of men she remembered from the end of the last war, hanging around street corners, maimed and scarred, dependent on their wives, without jobs, without pensions. She stirred her drink, dredging up the chocolate stuck to the bottom to blend it with the milk. How would she feed the baby then? How would she become anything other than her mother? She didn’t want to be her mother. Anything but that.
She finished her drink, paid the waiter and started the walk home, dawdling at the shop windows displaying fur coats, stoles and evening dresses, walking quickly past the boarded-up windows, past the Jewish draper defiantly open for business, with nothing to sell and no customers. She stopped at a stall and bought some flowers for her room. White roses, short stemmed. Would she tell her mother now or on Friday? She should wait. Enjoy the privacy, the quietness.
When would she write to Peter? Would he want a boy or a girl? What did she want?
She took a quick, sharp breath. Nothing deformed. She didn’t want anything maimed. And shocking. The field trip to that house south of Berlin had been shocking. When she and the other girls were taken by bus, led up a marble staircase by a nurse in crisp white and brought into a room with tall windows, ornate ceilings. The noise. The screeches. The stench. The faeces on the wall. The puddles of urine. The nurse shoved her further into the room of metal cots and screaming children in stained lilac cotton gowns.
‘You are here to learn, young lady.’
Katharina stared at the twisted limbs shunting across the green linoleum floor towards her, closing her eyes as they pawed at her feet and legs, as they pulled themselves up with her skirt, smearing her with snot and saliva drooling from faces contorted by birth or faulty genes.
‘They are happy to see you,’ said the nurse.
Katharina ran through the door when it reopened, down the stairs to the reception room, towards coffee and cakes with thick fresh cream. Later the nurse addressed the youth movement girls in neat uniform and tidy hair on the importance of choosing the right husband.
‘It’s vital to ensure there are no impurities – of blood, flesh or brain – that might pass from one generation to the next.’
‘What will happen to them?’ said Katharina.
‘That is to be decided. It costs a lot to keep them here, money that could be better spent on healthy children.’
Katharina walked faster, her feet pounding the pavement. She knew nothing about her husband, or his family. Nothing about the child growing inside her. She chose him for the strength in his sinewy
hands. For the light smile on his face. The kindness of his eyes. She knew nothing about his parents. His grandparents. About what lay inside him. It was inside her now.
She turned the key in the lock. She would say nothing to her mother now. Not yet. Nor to Peter. She would wait until she knew more.
13
He read her letter six, eight, ten times, folded it, slipped it back into its envelope and, still in his socks, walked down the stairs of the house in Poltava. Faustmann, Kraft and Weiss were by the stove, at cards.
‘I’m going to be a father.’
‘Bloody hell, you’re a fast mover,’ said Faustmann.
‘Congratulations,’ said Kraft. ‘When is the baby due?’
‘July.’
‘We’ll be done here by then,’ said Weiss.
They toasted him with vodka and dealt a new hand.
14
Katharina tied her scarf more tightly and moved up the line, closer to the ducks and geese hanging from steel hooks in the butcher’s
window. Mrs Sachs came towards her, a brown parcel under her arm, white string in a neat knot.
‘I got a duck,’ she said.
‘It looks big,’ said Katharina.
‘I’d have preferred a goose. More traditional.’
‘I’d be happy with either.’
‘You should have been here earlier.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Word went around last night.’
‘We didn’t hear.’
‘You would have heard if you hadn’t moved,’ said Mrs Sachs. ‘The new people in your old place got a goose. A big one.’
‘They’ll have a good Christmas then. And how are you, Mrs Sachs?’
‘Well enough under the circumstances. My son is outside Moscow. The cold is killing him.’
‘The cold is killing us all, Mrs Sachs. Have you any coal?’
‘We haven’t the luxury of a fireplace, Katharina. As you will no doubt remember.’
‘It’s a curse rather than a luxury, Mrs Sachs, when there is no coal and the wind blows into the apartment.’
‘How is your husband?’
‘Fine. Safe. We’re expecting a baby in the summer.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you. I’m very excited.’
‘How is your mother? I never see her now.’
‘She’s well, Mrs Sachs. Enjoying the new apartment.’
Katharina moved up the queue, close enough to see the spikes of the S-shaped hooks digging into the birds, their flaccid necks shifting in the breeze from the open door. She craned her neck. There were
eight birds in the window, all of them ducks. In front of her were ten women. The butcher was still drawing on stocks from inside the shop. She turned to the woman behind her.
‘It’s nerve-racking, isn’t it?’
‘Awful.’
A car stopped outside the shop and a woman got out, her hair and make-up perfect, her body sculpted by a woollen jacket and skirt. Her driver, in black uniform, shifted the queue to one side. The woman walked into the shop.
‘Who is she?’ said Katharina.
‘I think it’s more “what” than “who”,’ said the woman behind her.
Katharina watched the suited woman point at the ducks in the window. The butcher removed three from the display. A woman ahead of Katharina started to cry, but fell silent as the suited woman left the shop, her driver carrying the ducks to the boot of the car. He drove off and the queue moved back to its previous position. The butcher served eight more women, then shut his door and pulled down his blinds. Katharina knocked at the door. He didn’t answer. The remaining women shuffled away, hiding their tears from their children.
She climbed into bed when she got home as it was too cold in the apartment of high ceilings and large rooms without coal. She missed the cloying cosiness of their old kitchen. Her mother did too, although neither woman would admit it.
She woke in the darkness of a winter afternoon. She got up, wrapped a cashmere blanket over her shoulders and went to the living room, braced for the cold, and surprised by the warmth. There was a fire in the grate. Her parents sat on the sofa in front of it, giggling.
‘There is more,’ said her father.
She looked at the mound of coal still on the slate, waiting to be burned.
‘So I see,’ she said. ‘It’s fantastic.’
‘Go and look in the kitchen, Katharina.’
On the counter, lying between the cooker and the sink, were a goose, a leg of lamb, sausages, a bag of potatoes, carrots, two turnips and a bottle of wine.
She shrieked and embraced her father.
‘And there’s more,’ he said. ‘Let me show you.’
He dipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
‘Stand in front of the fire please, ladies.’
He draped gold and emerald around his wife’s neck, silver and sapphire over his daughter’s wrist. They each kissed him and looked at themselves in the hall mirror, above their new bust of Wagner. Mrs Spinell was crying.
‘You’re a marvellous man, Günther Spinell,’ she said. ‘You have served this family well.’
Katharina fingered her bracelet.
‘It’s just a pity we have nowhere to wear them,’ she said.
‘Oh, but you do,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Dr Weinart’s house tomorrow. To hear the Führer’s Christmas message.’
Their backs straight, the two women walked either side of Günther Spinell up to the first floor of the doctor’s house. A coal fire blazed there too, but the other guests, the women in silk, were indifferent to it as they drained their champagne and picked canapés from the train of passing plates. Mrs Spinell whispered to her daughter.
‘Don’t guzzle, Katharina. Remember that we have plenty to eat at home.’
Katharina moved about the room, introducing herself, admiring dresses and jewellery, accepting admiration of her bracelet, revelling in the conversation. Mrs Weinart was especially charming.
‘I have heard about your family, Mrs Faber. You should come for morning coffee with your lovely mother.’
Dr Weinart demanded their silence and called the company to gather around the radio, Katharina towards the front. The voice entered the room, and people bowed their heads. She listened to the rise and rise of his pitch, but drifted off to replay her success at the party, to run her hand across her expanding womb, to relish the growth of her new life.