Summer at Gaglow (11 page)

‘Hurry now,’ their father called from the front door. ‘Don’t keep your mother waiting.’ And without looking back for Schu-Schu or their brother they rushed off in a froth of white.

The party jostled with old men and younger sons, boys of seventeen, dressed up as soldiers and talking of nothing else than that the war would last until the date of their next birthday. Emanuel arrived half an hour late. ‘I wanted to walk,’ he whispered, as his sisters crowded round him like a flock of doves. His face was flushed and his hair curled damply from the snow.

‘Are you freezing?’ Eva asked, but Angelika and Julika were waiting for him by the door, ‘We need your help,’ and it transpired that an artist had been brought in to arrange a
tableau vivant
, and Emanuel was to be its centrepiece.

‘But not everyone’s help is needed, obviously,’ Bina said, as, blushing and protesting, Emanuel was led away. Very soon Angelika reappeared and asked that Eva might come with her too. Someone small and light was needed to stand with wings and a trumpet at the top of a ladder. A curtain would be drawn below so that from the audience she would appear to be suspended in thin air.

A gasp went up from the guests when the double doors were thrown apart and the tableau was displayed. It was a scene of military victory. Emanuel stood with his sword bared and the German flag fluttering above him. Actors who had been hired to play the conquered enemy lay dying at his feet, and a choir burst into song once the scene had been fully taken in. Eva stood at the top of her ladder, her wings balanced precariously, grinning, and once the sighing harmonies of the choir had faded out, she raised the trumpet to her lips and let out a long, discordant bellow. The crowd stirred, laughing and clapping and the floor was cleared for dancing.

Eva sat at the side and watched. She saw Bina glide past with a tall blond officer in squeaking boots, and Martha, graceful in the arms of a professor. As they danced Martha kept her face tilted, and her ear open to hear his version of the birth of Aphrodite. ‘She was born of sea foam, after the brutal castration of Uranus, and washed ashore, naked as the dawn.’ Martha paled, but he continued with details of Aphrodite’s marriage and the child that she bore for her earthly Trojan lover. Martha’s ear glowed pink and her ankles quivered, but it took three long dances before she could ease herself away.

‘May I have the honour of this dance?’ It was Emanuel who had taken pity on her.

‘Oh, if you insist,’ Eva said, jumping up, and it was only then that she found she had forgotten to unstrap her wings.

‘Keep them on,’ Emanuel whispered. ‘It will give us more room.’ And when she stepped on his toes during the first waltz he laughed and called her his left-footed little angel.

On the last day of Emanuel’s leave, Marianna woke out of a hollow web of dreams. ‘It would be less cruel not to have allowed him home at all,’ she said, and the words formed in curlicues in the cold room. ‘It would have been far less painful.’ And, unable to bear the thought of his departure, she swung out of bed and let her toes feel blindly for her slippers. She would run through to his room and wake him. Force him to look her in the eye. Tell him that she hadn’t seen him properly and that he couldn’t possibly leave until, at the very least, they could reacquaint themselves. She twisted her hair as she hurried along, tucking it under the collar of her gown so that it formed a ridge down her back like the long moulded spine of a dragon.

Outside Emanuel’s door she stopped and calmed herself. ‘Manu,’ she whispered, and when there was no answer, she eased the handle and went in. Emanuel was not in bed. She stood there for a minute, expecting to be startled as he stepped back from the window or rose up from his desk, and it took her several moments to see that the room was empty. The curtains were drawn back and, breathing hard to calm herself, she watched the snow falling in the street, swirling and catching on the hurrying figures as they went about the beginnings of their day.

And then Manu slipped into the room. He was already dressed. ‘It’s difficult to sleep,’ he offered, and she reached out to him and placed her hand around the fingers of his fist. ‘It would be easier if they didn’t allow one home at all,’ he said. And Marianna flushed indignantly and refused to accept what he was saying. ‘You can’t understand,’ he interrupted her. ‘Nothing has changed for you. It’s as if the war were a bad smell, far off, blowing the other way.’ And when she said nothing, he clasped his hands, cold suddenly and white, behind his back.

Emanuel caught the train, his pockets full of cigarettes and short cigars for trading, his bag heavy with packed food, wrapped and arranged around his kit. There were potato cakes, and scones baked with raisins, a spiralling coil of sausage and two packets of butter wrapped in muslin. His mother had tried to add tall jars of fruit: apricots and plums preserved in syrup and a pot of stem ginger. But Emanuel had been unable to imagine spooning up these delicacies in the sleet and squalor of a camp and he had refused to take them.

His father, alone, accompanied him to the station. It was at his insistence that the others remained behind and he kissed each of his sisters goodbye in the hall, taking a last good look at them as Marianna held open the heavy door against the snow. Schu-Schu stood with her hands on Eva’s shoulders, and as Emanuel disappeared down the street, Eva felt her fingers tightening until she had to duck away to avoid a bruise. ‘You’re hurting me.’ She twisted round and was surprised to see a hard look of fury on her governess’s face. ‘Schu?’ Eva pulled her arm, and in an instant Schu-Schu had softened back into herself and was bustling the girls in out of the cold.

The two men remained silent through the shouts and echoes of the station. They strode together down the crowded platform and Wolf looked on as Emanuel found a seat, threw his bag onto a rack and opened a window for the last, gruff goodbye. They smiled at each other, wishing on and dreading the sharp sound of the whistle, and then, as doors began to slam and the wheels rocked, hissing and moaning, Wolf took his son’s hand. He clasped it in his own, holding onto it as the train began to pull away. ‘Your inheritance,’ he whispered fiercely, and as their arms were drawn apart, Emanuel found a large warm coin lodged against his palm.

Emanuel sat amid a crowd of soldiers, new recruits and several older men showing signs of wounds only recently repaired. He did not look at them but gazed into the hot, rich heart of his gold. It was not money but a medal, carved on one side with thick ears of corn, and on the other in small print the words Belgard and Son. He smiled and pressed it in his hands. This will always be worth something, when everything else is dust, and he thought how a nub of gold would not splatter and disintegrate when caught in the blast of a shell. It may dent if fired upon but even a bullet hole through its core would not detract from its intrinsic value. And he began to think of Josef Friedlander and how during his week’s leave he had avoided the subject of his disappearance, locking him out from the comfort of his home. He closed his eyes to let in the image of his friend, lit up as he had seen him last and staggering on the stumps of his legs. Emanuel felt again the explosion that had driven him back into his trench where he had lain against the warm wet body of a boy, dying on his first day at the front, and it wasn’t until daybreak, when the fighting had calmed, that he was able to crawl over the ground to search for Josef, peering into the muddy and devastated faces of the wounded, and turning up the legless corpses of men. Neither he nor anyone else he knew of had ever had another sighting of Josef Friedlander, and it was concluded that he must have fallen and drowned in a waterlogged crater, one of many blown into the earth. Emanuel did not know whether or not a letter had been sent to the Friedlanders, with the official ‘missing in action’ written across it. But if it had, no news of it had been passed on to Bina, who stubbornly refused to let his silence stamp out her feelings for him. Emanuel had a letter from her now, folded safely in his jacket pocket, and at the top of his canvas bag lay a pair of finely knitted socks. They lay side by side with socks of his own. Dark green and knee high, with purple, well-turned heels. A present from the Samson girls whose names in cross-stitch were tucked away under the wide rim of the ribbing.

Emanuel slipped the medal into the long pocket of his trousers. He could feel it there, warm against his thigh, and he hoped it might protect him through the rest of the winter and into the spring. ‘On my next leave I shall not go home,’ he promised himself, repeating what he had whispered for goodbye into Schu-Schu’s ear, and in that way he felt he could will, through his own impending sacrifice, an end to the war before the summer.

Emanuel opened his eyes. The new recruits had set up a card game and were laying bets for cigarettes. They nodded to him and he shrugged and joined them, laying down his cards and raising the stakes with a cigar.

Roaming in the Gaglow orchard, attempting to identify the blossom, Eva was caught in a rainstorm, and rather than run back to the house she stayed crouched under a tree. The downpour was exhilarating. She loved the rain cracking through the afternoon, spraying her face and arms. But then the sky opened up with lightning and the tree under which she was sheltering began to shudder in a low, rough wind. She heard her name called from the back door of the house and just as she was tensed to run, another rolling wave of thunder darkened the sky, followed in three short seconds by a blaze of lightning. She heard her name again, ghostly on the wind, but she didn’t dare move from where she was. The rain had turned cold and the cotton of her dress was wringing. The bow in her hair whipped into her eyes and, unable to help herself, she began to cry. Her tears were warm, and the running of her nose fell hotly on her upper lip. She put up her hands to catch some of the heat between her fingers, and as she did so the brittle branches of the tree snapped above her head and the sky lit up with a crack of cold white light. Eva opened her mouth to scream when a hand reached out and pulled her into the open. It was her mother, who clasped an arm around her and, stumbling over the ruts and trenches of the orchard, ran with her to the house.

Eva was too excited to go to bed. ‘I narrowly missed being struck by lightning,’ she boasted, through chattering teeth. But Marianna, her lips white, her hands shaking, insisted on a fire being lit in the nursery and that Eva, once her wet clothes had been removed, should sit wrapped in rugs and be forced to drink a bowl of soup. Marianna brought it up herself. She had the cook make it clear from chicken stock and sticks of thyme, and she sat by Eva’s bed to see that every last mouthful was spooned and drunk. ‘I have sent for the doctor,’ she said, and when Eva wriggled and protested, Marianna only tightened the blankets round her neck and put a hand to her forehead.

By midnight Eva was delirious. Her temperature had soared and her throat was so inflamed that she could hardly swallow. The doctor declared it a severe case of flu. He stood at the end of her bed while Marianna scanned his face for the diagnosis he was too afraid to give. ‘Surely she has all the symptoms of pneumonia?’ Marianna challenged, and the doctor looked up startled, as if she had caught him on the exact word.

He knelt down and slipped a hand under the back of Eva’s head. ‘We must hope she pulls through the night,’ he said, giving up on the pretence, and he pushed her eyelids back to check on the milky blue of her delirium.

The doctor, who had driven over from the nearest town, stayed on at Herr Belgard’s insistence. He was given a room on the floor below with a high and inviting wooden bed, but decided for the sake of his reputation to remain in an armchair in the nursery, where he could keep an eye on any change in the condition of his patient. Marianna was too upset to talk. She pulled a chair up to Eva’s bedside and mumbled out a string of incoherent prayers.

Fräulein Schulze hovered by the fire. ‘Eva,’ she whispered, ‘you should have called for me.’ And unable to restrain herself, she rushed over and plumped up the pillows, adjusted the clutter of the bedside table and placed a hand over her burning charge.

Three days later, Eva woke, feeling light and dry and strangely happy. The burning embers of a nightfire smouldered in the grate and the chairs around her bed were empty. She threw back the blanket and let her feet slide to the floor. The whiteness of her skin was mesmerizing and her blood, when she ran across the room, pricked and tingled in her joints. She knelt up on the window-sill and pushed her head out between the curtains. It was her favourite time of day: the beginning of the morning when the sun has washed away all traces of the dawn. Eva unhooked the latch and let in a still cool draught of air. She let it play over her face and down between the buttons of her nightdress, enjoying the coldness of her fingertips and the shiver that ran along her spine. She could still feel the cloying warmth of the room on the soles of her upturned feet and she longed to jump out into the morning. She pushed the latch further and, twisting on the wide sill, she began to turn herself round. The slap caught her leg. It came from nowhere and stopped her breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Her mother’s voice flew at her, and she was pulled down from the window-sill and rushed back to bed. Marianna wrapped the blankets high up round her shoulders, and then clasping her swaddled body she held her tight and cried into her hair.

Eva was mystified. ‘What have I done?’ But Marianna continued to hold her, muttering Bina’s name through her own as she rocked her in her arms.

Eva was kept in bed for weeks. At night the fever caught her up, less forcibly with time, but in the mornings she continued to wake with an overwhelming longing to get up and run into the cool bright air. One afternoon the children from the village school came up to Gaglow to wish her well in convalescing. They trooped into the nursery, almost twenty of them, and sang songs in an arc around her bed. Eva sat up and stared at them. The girls had plaited hair and short silver lashes, with eyes that watered with emotion when they sang. The boys made fists with their hands and thumped them hard against the leather of their shorts. After several rousing verses, the village teacher led them in a poem, mouthing the words encouragingly and with expressions of exaggerated melodrama.