involve a return to Berlin, and another separation from his son and Effi.
Paul was still in bad shape, but Russell suspected that there was little he could offer in the way of help, that the boy had to find his own road back. And there were signs, every now and then, that he was doing just that. It might be wishful thinking, but he thought his son would eventually work out how best to live with his past.
He was not so certain that he and Effi could survive another long separation. It had been wonderful finding her again, but once the joy of the first few days had passed they had struggled to re-establish the easy loving companionship that they had once taken for granted. It could be a great deal worse — the recently reunited couple upstairs came to mind — but something indefinable had gone missing. What it was, and why it had gone, were still a mystery. Was it just the length of the separation? Three and a half years was a long time, and their lives in that period had been so different: hers fraught with danger, his a relative cakewalk. Had Rosa come between them? Russell felt no resentment — he loved her as much as Effi did — but the girl might have shifted some balance in their relationship. Or was it something simpler, like their both being out of work, or the length of time that they’d been together?
He didn’t know, and neither, he guessed, did she. It was probably all those things, and a few more besides.
Maybe time would cure them, but somehow he doubted it. Looking out across the brown river, he felt more than a little scared for the future.
A light rain began to fall as Effi waited outside the school gates, and she gratefully unfurled the umbrella which Zarah had insisted she take. There had been smiles of recognition from a couple of other women, but frowns of disapproval from a couple more. Her being German had upset some in the beginning, and Effi had hoped that recounting her anti-Nazi exploits in the local paper might reduce any opprobrium which she — and by extension, Rosa — would have to cope with. But while some had probably been mollified, others seemed even more inclined to hold up their noses.
Looking round, she saw another new male face — as the term went by, more and more demobbed fathers were collecting their children. Effi wondered if Rosa had noticed, and thought that she probably had. The girl didn’t miss much.
There were other children whose fathers were not coming home, but most of them seemed to know it. Would it be easier for Rosa if she knew that her father was dead?
The young Jewish girl had arrived at the door to Effi’s Berlin apartment just weeks before the end of the war. Rosa and her mother Ursel had been hidden by an elderly gentile woman for several years, but first Ursel was killed by an American bomb, and then the woman fell seriously ill. The girl had been left with no one to look after her, and the Swede Erik Aslund, who ran the Jewish escape line that Effi worked for, had begged her to take Rosa in.
She never regretted saying yes — the girl, though obviously and deeply traumatised, was an absolute delight. And now that Effi was thirty-nine, the only child she was ever likely to have.
Effi had asked the girl about her father Otto, but all Rosa could remember was his leaving one day and not coming back. She had been about three, she thought, which would place the man’s disappearance sometime around 1941. He was most likely dead, but they couldn’t be sure. Up until June of that year, Jews had still been allowed to leave Germany, and even after that date, some had escaped. Of those that stayed, several thousand of the so- called U-boats had survived several years in hiding, mostly in Berlin. So there was more than a fleeting chance that Otto was still alive.
But if he was, no trace had yet been found. Effi had been round all the refugee agencies in London, and each had agreed to pester their Berlin offices, but so far to no avail. Private correspondence between Germany and the outside world was still not allowed, so there was nothing they could do themselves. When a returning British soldier had kindly dropped off a letter from his ex-wife’s brother Thomas, Russell had tried and failed to find a carrier for his reply. When the restrictions were lifted, Effi knew Thomas would conduct a thorough search for Otto, but in the meantime…
The school doors opened, and a host of children swept out to the gate, borne on a tide of laughter and chatter. Such a comforting sound, Effi thought, one of those things you never appreciated until it disappeared, as it had in Berlin during the final years of the war.
Rosa was walking with a blonde girl around her own age. Catching sight of Effi, she almost pulled the other girl across to introduce her. ‘This is Marusya,’ she said. ‘She’s from Russia.’
‘How do you do?’ Effi said carefully in English. She was leaning down to shake the girl’s hand when the mother bustled up and seized it instead. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she almost shouted, and tugged the girl away.
Effi stared after them, feeling more upset for Marusya than herself. Rosa, though, seemed unconcerned. ‘Marusya likes drawing too,’ she confided.
They started for home, sharing Zarah’s umbrella and taking the usual path across the foot of Parliament Hill. Rosa chatted happily about her day at school. If she was thinking about her father, she was keeping it to herself.
Back at the flat Zarah was preparing the evening meal and listening to The Robinson Family on the wireless. She was also glancing frequently at the clock, Effi noticed. Lothar had announced the previous week that he was too old to be collected from school by his mother, and the way Zarah’s whole body relaxed when she heard him in the hall was almost painful to behold. He gave his mother a dutiful kiss and an ‘I told you so’ look.
A few minutes later the neighbours upstairs started one of their loud and increasingly frequent arguments. The demobbed husband had been home for several weeks now, and things were clearly building to a climax — the last time Effi had seen the wife she had clumsily tried to conceal the fact that both eyes were blackened. Effi itched to intervene, but knew it wouldn’t help. She also had vivid memories of the anti-German outburst that the women had directed at her while complaining about Paul’s noisy nightmares.
Listening to them scream at each other in a language she barely understood, she felt a sudden intense yearning for her real home.
‘Is John here for dinner?’ Zarah asked, interrupting her thoughts.
‘I think so.’
‘Are you two all right?’ her sister inquired in a concerned voice.
‘Yes, of course. What makes you ask?’ Effi replied, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice.
Zarah didn’t push it. ‘Oh, nothing. This is a hard time for everyone.’
‘How often do you think about Jens?’ Effi asked, partly in self-defence. Zarah had last seen her husband, a high-ranking bureaucrat in Hitler’s regime, in April. During their final conversation he had proudly announced that he had suicide pills for them both.
‘Not as often as I used to. I don’t miss him, but I do wonder what happened to him. And I know Lothar does. He has good memories of his father. I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better not to know. Other times… well…’
Through the doorway to the front room Effi could see Rosa drawing. There was so much unfinished business, so many loose ends… She had a sudden mental picture of the blood-soaked operating room in the Potsdam Station bunker, of stumps being tidied up and cauterised. It wasn’t so easy with minds.
Tuesday morning, the fog eventually lifted to reveal a cold and overcast day. Russell caught a Fulham-bound bus in Piccadilly, and was soon glad he had done so. As part of their current dispute, the conductors were still refusing to allow anyone to stand, and the packed bus was soon leaving knots of irate passengers behind. Traffic was heavy in any case, and their conductor’s determination to explain himself at every stop rendered their progress even slower than it might have been. When the bus finally ground to a halt halfway down the Fulham Road a large proportion of the male passengers decided to continue on foot.
The hawkers were out in force, and doing a fine trade in toffee apples and oranges. The local children were busy pocketing pennies for storing bicycles in their front gardens and ‘looking after’ cars in the side streets. There were two programmes on sale — an official blue one and a pirate version in red. Russell bought them both for Paul, more out of habit than anything else. Paul had been an avid collector as a boy, but the urge had obviously faded, at least for the moment. Russell wondered what had happened to the boy’s stamp collection. If the albums had been left at the house in Grunewald, someone would have stolen them by now.
Picturing that house brought Paul’s mother Ilse to mind. He had met her in Moscow in 1924, at the same conference where his and Shchepkin’s paths had first crossed. He still found it hard to believe she was dead.
