She spoke quietly, fixing his gaze as she had when she first saw him in the cathedral. Then she turned away, walking faster and faster. The sound of the Angelus bell filled her head. Perhaps it had stopped, but as she hurried out through the park, back towards the road, she could still hear it ringing.
Francis Byrne watched her walk away. He heard the bell too, in his own head. It was a daily sound of reassurance and faith in his life. Now it hurt. The strength Hannah had just seen in his eyes was an illusion. As he whispered the familiar words to himself they seemed less familiar, less comfortable, less reassuring, as if they no longer quite belonged on his lips. ‘Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.’ The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. ‘Et concepit de Spiritu Sanctu.’ And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Hannah sat in the restaurant in Frauengasse for a long time that night. She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to go back to her room at the Danziger Hof. She needed to do something. She felt a long way from the people she cared about, the people who cared about her. But she wasn’t sure being with them would help. Her mother and father thought she was in England. That was a simple enough lie. Other lies weren’t so easy. Her mother probably knew some of them, but she would never say anything. Sarah Rosen had always believed that life’s difficulties would go away if only you spent long enough not talking about them. Hannah’s father never spoke when things went wrong for different reasons; he didn’t notice. She loved them; him for his fond blindness, her for her indefatigable hope in a natural law that said things got better if you left them alone and didn’t pick at the bones. As a Jew it was an approach to life that set hope defiantly in the face of experience.
Hannah had always envied Susan’s family its furious passions and even more furious arguments. In the Fields’ house everyone talked about everything; every slight, every mood, every love, every hate. Sometimes it seemed as if the smaller the problem the more noise it generated, as the whole family, mother, father, grandparents, children, dissected and criticised each other’s opinions and moods. They lurched from laughter to tears and back again with chaotic intensity; they were rude, dismissive, sarcastic, intolerant and unforgiving, sometimes for as long as a whole afternoon. They told each other everything and if there were no secrets or conflicts or emotional disasters to be revealed, they’d make some up anyway. Hannah’s house was, by contrast, a place of small gestures of fondness rather than fierce statements of love and despair. They never said exactly what they felt. And yet it had all changed for Susan. Her mother died, her sisters left Ireland, and after a while her father’s voice was only heard in the synagogue. With all the open hearts that had surrounded her as a child, she found no one to talk to in the face of what became the last as well as the first real crisis of her adult life. Perhaps Hannah and Susan weren’t so different. Or perhaps there were times you were alone, simply alone, and that was it. Hannah felt that now.
In Palestine Benny was waiting for her to come back. And it was back, not home. Whatever she sometimes wanted to believe, Ireland was still home. It had seemed like a good idea for her to spend these months in Europe. There was the money to collect and send on its circuitous way through Europe to Palestine, to buy arms for the Haganah. There was a system in place and no shortage of helping hands along the way. It wasn’t dangerous. Hannah was a courier, no more than that. But she knew why Benny had pushed her forward. It gave her the chance to spend some time with her family in Ireland. He knew she needed to try to find out what had happened to Susan Field too. He wanted her to get it out of her system. Not just Susan. Ireland. He understood that she had to come to terms with her friend’s death, but he didn’t understand everything it had stirred up. Finding out about Susan was complicated. It was not only a reason to go home; it was also an excuse.
When she first left Ireland for Palestine, Hannah was determined she wouldn’t live anywhere she was ill-at- ease. She had felt the darkness in Europe drawing in. She wanted Ireland to be immune from that but it wasn’t. Yet Jewish Palestine hadn’t become the place she wanted it to be. She was ill-at-ease there sometimes as well. She had poured her passion into it, and if that flagged she had Benny now; he had enough passion for both of them when it came to Israel. But it wasn’t enough. She had left her home behind, with the full consciousness that she wanted to escape the kind of mild and unemotional ordinariness of her mother and father’s marriage, yet she was going to marry a man she felt friendship and admiration for, rather than love and passion. All around them there were extraordinary things happening. And there was nothing ordinary about Benny Jacobson. Life was too important for ordinariness as far as he was concerned. They were creating a new Israel. But when the door closed on that, and they were alone, she wasn’t sure she knew him. When they stopped talking breathlessly about the future of a nation, she wasn’t sure they had anything else to talk about. Perhaps he had used up all his passion. He never argued with her; he never lost his temper. How could she tell her parents she was afraid of a life that was only distinguished from theirs by the sunshine?
Hannah and Susan had never lied to one another in their letters, but there was a truth that neither of them recognised in the other. Susan read about Hannah’s relationship with Benny, already a second-generation Jewish immigrant in Palestine, with envy. When Hannah first read about Susan’s secret love affair, she was sometimes envious too, simply because it was full of the passion she told herself didn’t matter. That envy faded on Hannah’s part as she became more and more anxious about her friend’s hopeless relationship. But both of them were lost in different ways; perhaps they had both sensed it in each other. If they had, it was too late to say anything now.
The waiter poured her another glass of wine. As she drank it she felt the events of the day blurring with all the other things that were in her head. The person she needed to talk to was Stefan. He would have got more out of Francis Byrne, much more. Her journey was ending and she still hadn’t achieved what she had set out to achieve. There were still no answers. She was angry, with herself as much as with anyone else. As she left the restaurant and walked back to the hotel through the narrow, ancient streets, the swastikas fluttered above her all the way. They seemed to hang at every window, flapping and cracking threateningly in the wind blowing from the Baltic.
In Langgasse an open truck drove past. In the back were young Nazis in uniform, electioneering; making sure that any opposition that dared to appear on the streets was beaten to a pulp. After two months there was no one really left to beat. Shouts and wolf-whistles were flung in her direction from the truck as she turned into Kohlenmarkt. The lights of the Hotel Danziger Hof shone brightly ahead. The square was full of people. Coming towards her was a brass band, flying the obligatory red, white and black and playing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’. The crowds around her were applauding and singing. ‘Zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum deutschen Rhein, wer will des Stromes Huter sein?’ The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine, who will stand watchman on the Rhine? She took no notice of the cars outside the hotel or of the uniformed Danzig policemen at the door. She had no reason to. Even if she had noticed the man in the leather coat talking to them she wouldn’t have known he was a Danzig Gestapo officer. Suddenly a car door opened in front of her. She almost collided with the man who leapt out. ‘Jesus, look where you’re going!’ He was young, twenty-five. He looked at her hard, but there was a smile on his lips. He saw she was a little drunk.
‘Fraulein Rosen?’
‘Yes,’ she said automatically, unthinkingly in English.
He grabbed her wrist. Now she was aware of another man behind her, holding her other arm. She struggled and started to call out. ‘What are you doing? Let go of me!’ The second man put his hand over her mouth and then she was inside the car, the two men on either side of her. She was still being held tightly; her mouth was still covered. There was no room to struggle. The driver put the car into gear and pulled away. It had taken only seconds. No one had heard her over the sound of the brass band. Most of the people in the square hadn’t even noticed. Those who had were too used to seeing people pushed into cars by the Schutzpolizei or the Gestapo, or being thrown off the back of moving trucks by Nazi stormtroopers, to feel there was anything unusual going on. There was, after all, an election to win. It was just the rough and tumble of democracy. Inside the car the grip on Hannah Rosen’s arms was unyielding. The hand over her mouth pushed her head back even more painfully into the seat. There was no point fighting.
14. Danzig-Langfuhr
The De Havilland Dragon Rapide rattled down the runway at Baldonnel and pulled up into the sky south of Dublin. Below Stefan Gillespie were the hills that stretched down into Wicklow. It was a clear April morning, a little after nine o’clock. It was the first time he had been in an aeroplane. He was surprised how unsurprising it was. There was a sense of exhilaration when the bi-plane lifted off and he first gazed down at the countryside below, trying to recognise where he was as they headed east towards the sea. He looked at the fields pegged out with
