Anger or resentment would have been easier. ‘Please,’ Effi said, ‘I don’t need the flat at the moment — I’m staying with friends. I shall want it back eventually, but I won’t ask you to leave until you have somewhere else to live. And I’ll help you find somewhere. In the new year, we can start looking.’
The woman was using a hand on the table to hold herself upright, Effi realised. Both mother and daughter were in desperate need of a decent meal.
‘Look, I’m an actress,’ Effi told her. ‘For reasons best known to themselves, that means the authorities give me top-grade rations. More than I need. So please take these,’ she said, searching through her bag for the relevant coupons. ‘Give your children a good meal. And yourself.’
After only a slight hesitation the woman took them. She looked more bewildered than ever.
As well she might, Effi thought. A stranger arrives, claims the family home, and then dispenses gifts. ‘I’ll come and see you again after Christmas,’ Effi said. ‘And don’t worry — you can stay as long as you need to.’
‘Thank you,’ the woman said.
‘What’s your name?’ Effi asked her.
‘Ilse. Ilse Reitermaier. Thank you.’
Effi went back down to the street. Sensing watching eyes, she turned to see mother and child looking out of the window. She waved and they waved back.
She wondered how many families Hitler had torn apart with his stupid war. And how many more Seymour Exner would destroy with the one that he was planning. Did men never learn?
Of course the war had been good to some. Men like Geruschke and his ex-Gestapo underling were thriving on the misery of other people’s lives. She wondered how many other Nazis he was employing.
A sudden thought stopped her in her tracks. She could bring Jews to the Honey Trap, Jews from Schulstrasse and the survivor organisations, Jews that Ali and Fritz and Wilhelm Isendahl knew. They were bound to recognise some Nazis.
No, she thought. After what Exner had told her, it seemed clear that the authorities weren’t interested, and without some guarantee of official protection she would be putting the Jews in danger. So no.
She had only walked ten metres when the solution presented itself. Photographs. If she obtained photographs of Geruschke’s employees, she could show them around. The photographer would need an acceptable reason for popping off flashbulbs in the Honey Trap, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Some pictures for an article about something or other — how the soldiers enjoyed their leisure, the renaissance of cabaret, the rebirth of jazz in Berlin. Maybe Irma could pretend to commission some publicity photos.
First she needed a photographer. The one John used to use, the one Strohm had told him was back from the dead. Zembski, that was his name. The Fat Silesian. John had said he was working at the KPD newspaper offices. She had no idea where they were, but they shouldn’t be hard to find.
Next morning, Russell and Albert walked back up the hill to the station. Russell had vivid memories of catching a train there in August 1939 — his American editor had sent him to Bratislava to report on a pogrom, before hustling him on to Warsaw to witness the countdown to war. Ambulance-chasing on a continental scale.
His fellow passengers on that train had included a family of Jews intent on reaching the safety of Poland. All dead, most probably. And if they weren’t, they’d be fleeing in the opposite direction. In such circumstances, Zionism made perfect sense. A homeland in Palestine or shuttling to and fro across European borders, one step ahead of the knout. Put like that, it was no choice at all.
Their train headed north through the Czech countryside at a funereal pace, stopping at stations, on bridges, in the middle of dark, silent forests. Albert expressed no resentment over Russell’s reservations — he was, Russell realised, sure enough of his own mind to forgive the doubts in others. They talked for a while about Otto Pappenheim, and the possible reasons for his disappearance. When Russell mentioned Effi’s fear of handing Rosa back to a man who had abandoned her, Albert grew more serious, and warned them against pre-judgement. ‘After what some of them went through,’ he said sadly, ‘you could forgive them almost anything.’
After Brno they had the compartment to themselves. Albert laid himself out across a row of seats and was soon asleep, but Russell sat by the window, watching the wintry Moravian countryside and thinking about the next few days. They would reach Nachod that night or the following morning, and after finishing their business would cross into Poland. There had been an atlas in the UNRRA office at the Hotel Jelen, and Russell, boning up on the local geography, had discovered that Glatz — or whatever the Poles were now calling it — was the nearest railway station. He could travel to Breslau from there, along the line he’d once used to visit the Rosenfeld farm. Breslau was now in Poland, and doubtless sporting a new name, but the tracks would still be leading west to Berlin. If the Poles were uncooperative, he’d find some friendly Russians.
Thinking about the Rosenfeld farm, a possibility occurred to him — one that he and Effi had somehow missed. If Miriam had had her baby, and somehow healed herself in the process, might she then have tried to go home? Kuzorra had seen her in January 1942, so it would have been after that. But if she’d gone home that year or the next, only ruins awaited her — by that time her parents had long since fled over the mountains. So what would she have done — gone back to Berlin?
There was only one source of sanctuary that Russell knew of — Torsten Resch, the gentile neighbours’ boy who had always been sweet on her. He had worked in Breslau until his call-up in 1941. One or two years later, he was probably still in uniform, and Miriam would have sought him in vain. But the boy might have been invalided out; he might have been on leave when she came looking. It was the thinnest of chances, but she had to be somewhere. Alive or dead, she had to be somewhere. So why not Breslau? It shouldn’t take him more than a few hours to find out.
The afternoon wore on, until darkness finally filled the valleys. Yellow lamps now glowed on the station platforms, and myriad wood fires crackled beside the frequent refuge sidings. At one such passing place, their train pulled up alongside another, and the sound of singing rose from the latter’s lightless compartments, a young girl’s voice both sweet and infinitely sad. It was, Albert said, a song about a Jewish mother who saves her daughter by placing her in a Christian orphanage.
Another song followed, this one sung by many voices and accompanied by mandolin. According to Albert it was a paean to the writer’s home, a simple village somewhere in the Pale which he or she would never see again.
When their own train jerked into motion, and swallowed the voices up, Russell found himself feeling almost bereft. The emotions which flickered on Albert’s face were the ones Russell remembered from 1939 — anger and bitterness.
They travelled on, eventually reaching the junction for Nachod too late for the last connection. After checking the time of the first morning train, they walked across the dung-strewn forecourt to the only available inn. The proprietor’s initial suspicion of Albert was mollified by the false documentation, and Russell’s American passport was enough to secure them a late supper. The latter was somewhat spoiled — for Russell at least — by their host’s insistence on regaling them with tales of Czech revenge against the local Germans. Albert seemed happy to hear them, but the proprietor’s wife, who had served up their supper, looked even more disgusted than Russell. ‘What an achievement,’ she said sarcastically. ‘We’ve become just like them.’
There turned out to be several Party offices, but the one where Miroslav Zembski worked was on Klosterstrasse, in a building that Effi remembered as once housing an art gallery. The size of Zembski’s second floor office suggested a man of some importance.
He stared at Effi for several moments before recognition dawned. ‘Fraulein Koenen,’ he finally said, his face breaking into a smile. ‘Or are you and Herr Russell married these days?’
‘No, we still haven’t got round to it,’ Effi told him. Zembski was hardly wafer-thin, but it was difficult to believe that Russell had dubbed him ‘the Fat Silesian’.
‘I heard he was back. How is he?’
‘He’s all right. He’s in Austria at the moment — at least I think he is. But I know he means to come and see you — he only just heard you’re alive. When he turned up at your studio in 1941 and found that you’d been arrested… well, he feared the worst.’
‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Zembski said drily. ‘It would be good to see him again,’ he added, ‘but what can I do for you?’
