The English Girl (37 page)

‘Sweetheart, she has to get home,’ says Harri.

Lotte rushes towards me; then trips on one of the scattered crayons, stumbles. She bursts into tears, won’t stop sobbing. Her sobs are noisy, desperate, wretched, as though she’s a conduit for all the unspoken misery in the room.

Her sadness tugs at me. But I try to paste a cheerful smile on my face. I speak above her sobbing.

‘Sunday night then.’

Harri nods.

I leave them like that – Lotte sobbing, Eva wringing her hands, Harri with that white strained look on his face.

I walk away, down Mariahilferstrasse, where groups of men are shouting on the pavements, and cars and lorries screech past with swastika flags streaming out.

‘
Hängt Schuschnigg! Juden verrecken!
’

Hang Schuschnigg! Death to the Jews!

In these moments, he still feels close to me: I can smell his scent on my skin, in my hair, can feel the cool imprint of his mouth on my mouth.

I wake from a dream of Harri, fear spreading through me, remembering yesterday night.

I open the window. Cold air rushes in, with a scent of the changing seasons, a promise of spring. The sky is the clear blue of a bird’s egg. It’s unusually quiet for a Saturday.

The street looks different. Everywhere there are flags, flying from rooftops and windows. Far more than yesterday morning – before it happened, before the referendum was postponed. A few of the Austrian ones are still flying, but there are many new ones. Some are the official Nazi Party flags – red, with a large black swastika; but most are Austrian flags that have been altered, with rather irregular swastikas stitched or painted on. They have a home-made look: they must have been put together during the night. I wonder who made them. Are they the same people who were so thrilled by the referendum – who just yesterday morning were so keen to express their love of this land? How can this happen?

Marthe is at breakfast before me.

‘Rainer left early, Stella,’ she says. ‘He has a busy day. There’s to be a torchlight procession in the city centre tonight.’ There’s something a little reserved in her, as though she’s wary of me. Wary of what I might say to her. She raises her coffee cup to her mouth and takes a delicate sip. ‘A thanksgiving procession. To celebrate the new order.’

‘Oh.’

‘I think there’s a lot of relief that at least things are settled now,’ she tells me. ‘At least we know where we are. Uncertainty is so debilitating, Stella,’ she says.

I practise for my lesson. But I can’t concentrate. Usually, the discipline of practice soothes me, but today I can’t settle, and my fingers refuse to do what I ask them to do. My lesson tomorrow is sure to go badly. I keep thinking of Harri – imagine him saying goodbye to his patients, sorting everything out. It must be so painful for him.

Something disturbs me. I look up from my playing. The chandelier is rattling; you can see all the lustres shivering, and knocking against one another. I’m aware of a distant rumble, a huge, vast, throbbing sound, rapidly coming closer. The piano strings buzz and resonate.

I rush to the window, look up. There are planes, flying low; huge, black as shadow against the shine of the sky – a squadron of German bombers in exact formation. The throbbing of their engines drowns out every other sound.

I put my hand to the window: something is shaking. It could be the window-glass, it could be my hand.

Another squadron comes over, the vast noise surging through me.

I run downstairs, go out to the street, stand there, staring upwards. Still they come: squadron after squadron, circling low over the rooftops, blotting out the sky. Other people too are staring, from windows and doorways.

Marthe joins me.

‘It’s the Luftwaffe,’ she tells me.

‘Oh.’

‘Rainer said they’d be flying over.’ She has to shout; I can only just hear her above the roar of the planes.

There’s a white bird-like thing, drifting down from the sky; then a whole snowstorm of white paper.

‘Don’t worry, Stella, they’re only dropping leaflets,’ she says. ‘To let us know what’s happening.’

If these planes were dropping bombs, not paper, Vienna and all its people would be wiped from the face of the earth. The thought of this stops my breath. Thank God that Dr Schuschnigg surrendered without fighting.

The planes circle over Vienna. Their shadows move across us, and darken the sunlit pavement. I stand with Marthe, watching.

There’s a sound of shouting behind us. We turn. A gang of men comes lurching round the corner of the street. There are six of them. They all have swastika armbands, and they have a swagger to them. They make me think of the men who beat up Harri. They’re gesticulating, shouting; they have a rather wild look, and I wonder if they’ve been drinking, even so early in the day. Yet they seem too purposeful to be drunk, as they march on down Maria-Treu-Gasse, moving in our direction. I sense that they know exactly where they are heading to.

My pulse is skittering off. I put my hand on Marthe’s arm.

‘Marthe. We shouldn’t stay out here. We ought to go back inside.’

She stands there, transfixed; above us, the blue bright sky and the warplanes. I can feel a slight trembling in her, where my hand is holding her arm.

The men pay us no attention. They stop outside the opposite building, and beat and bang on the door. The caretaker opens to them at once. We hear the tramp of their footsteps up the stair, then shouts and screams from inside. After a few moments, the men come out with the people from the apartment – the frail old woman, the young, dark-haired woman, the child – the people who I’ve sometimes seen from my window.

The women look terrified. They’re carrying buckets of water and scrubbing brushes and rags, and the little girl is crying. One of the men is jostling the younger woman, so her bucket spills on the pavement, and seeing this, he hits her. The little girl wails; another man punches her viciously hard on the head. The woman puts out her hand to defend her child: her arm is knocked away. The men shout abuse at the women, hit them, push them over. If the women try to get up, they kick them again and again, screaming insults at them. The little girl crouches beside her mother, pressing her hand to her head. She’s crying silently now. Bright blood wells between her fingers.

Then I understand what the men are doing. They’re making the women scrub the paving stones, to try to erase the Schuschnigg slogans.

I clutch at Marthe’s arm.

‘Marthe. We have to do something. We have to get the police…’

She doesn’t say anything.

‘You go inside and I’ll try to find someone,’ I tell her.

It’s as though she’s spellbound, mute. Just staring.

More people gather, drawn by the shouting. They stand in a semi-circle, laughing, shouting abuse; some of them spit. Some are rough-looking, like the thugs who attacked Harri. But there are others, too. Respectable-looking people. There’s a man in a smart business suit, who fastidiously rolls up the legs of his trousers, to stop them getting wet in the water that’s spilt on the street. There’s a woman in a luxurious astrakhan coat. She has a small dog on a lead, and on her lapel she’s wearing a shiny new swastika badge. She joins in with the jeering. Above us, more squadrons of planes.

And then, at last, a policeman comes round the corner from Lange Gasse.

‘Thank God,’ I say under my breath.

He walks briskly up the street towards the crowd of people. He will intervene, stop this cruelty, assert the rule of law. I think how brave he’s being, as now it’s quite a large crowd – twenty or thirty people, pointing, spitting, shouting abuse.

One of the men in the gang turns towards the policeman, says something I can’t hear. The policeman throws back his head, laughs loudly. Cold runs through me.

Then I see that the policeman has a swastika armband. He aims a casual kick at the younger woman, as she scrubs the pavement. She falls sideways, clutching her stomach. There’s laughter. He spits in her face.

‘Marthe – we have to go in. We can’t do anything. Come on.’

I pull at her. She’s passive, weak as cotton; she doesn’t resist. I take her back into the building, and up the stairs to the flat.

She shuts the door behind her, leans against it. She’s trembling violently.

‘You should go and rest,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll ask Janika to bring you a coffee.’

But she doesn’t move, just stands there. As though she has no will; as though her body won’t obey her.

‘Come on, Marthe. I’ll take you through to the drawing room, you can take the weight off your legs.’

I take her arm and steer her.

‘No, Stella. Not the drawing room. I’d like to sit in the sun room,’ she says.

This surprises me – she usually has her coffee in the drawing room. But the sun room is secluded: it doesn’t look out on the street.

I settle her in an armchair. I bring her the footstool, so she can put up her legs and ease her varicose veins. I bring her embroidery basket to her.

‘I’ll fetch you some coffee,’ I tell her.

‘No. No coffee, thank you, Stella. I don’t quite fancy it,’ she says.

I stand there for a moment. She takes out her tapestry – the fairytale cottage with roses rambling over the door.

In the seclusion of the sun room, you can still hear the planes overhead, but their roar is muffled and dulled by the building.

‘The thing is, Stella…’ It’s almost as though she’s continuing a conversation we’ve had. ‘The thing is, this isn’t how I thought it would be—’ Her voice cracks like frost-bitten glass. She tries again. ‘This isn’t how I imagined it happening. Not like this,’ she tells me.

I wait a moment longer, but she doesn’t say anything more. She threads her needle, starts her stitching.

I try to practise, but it’s impossible. I’m so worried about Harri and his family. But at least Harri is at the hospital for the day. He should be safe there.

After a while, I look out into the street. The shouting is more distant now, the gang of men have moved on. There’s no sign of the people from the opposite flat. When I glance across at their windows, I can’t see anyone moving there, in those other rooms.

I think of the dark-haired woman, what I know about her. How she will brush the tangles out of her little girl’s hair. How she will care for the older woman – her mother, or mother-in-law. How the little girl makes her feel happy, and the old woman makes her feel sad. How she will put flowers into a vase, and hold one close to her face, lost in some subtle labyrinth of her mind, remembering. Living an ordinary life, a life of small things: small nurturing actions, dreams and memories, everyday decisions. Believing herself to be a citizen of Vienna – with all the rights and protections that ought to come from being a citizen. Believing herself to belong here.

I wish I’d done more to try to protect her. I could at least have protested, but I was too afraid.

At last, I pull on my coat and go to the building over the road. I scan the names outside the building. On the first floor: Herr and Frau Edelstein.

The caretaker comes to the door. He has eyes grey as flint, and a hard, closed face.

‘I want to see the woman in the first floor flat – Frau Edelstein,’ I tell him.

He looks me up and down.

‘You’re the English girl, aren’t you? From over the road. The girl who lives with the Krauses.’

‘Yes … I just wondered how Frau Edelstein was…’

He fixes me with his flinty eyes.

‘There’s a lot to be said for minding your own business,’ he tells me.

‘But was she badly hurt? Has she seen a doctor?’ I ask.

‘Best to stay out of it, fräulein. It’s no concern of yours, what’s happening in this city. So you say you come from Britain?’

I nod.

He shrugs slightly.

‘Perhaps you should go back where you came from,’ he says.

He shuts the door on me.

Rainer is out all day. In the evening, Marthe and I have dinner without him.

Marthe has put on more make-up than usual – powder and lipstick and rouge. She must have wanted to give herself a healthy colour, but the rouge looks garish against the white of her skin. Her hands look raw, where she’s been washing them.

For a while, we eat in silence.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Marthe starts talking.

‘What you have to remember, Stella, is the bigger picture…’ Her voice is even and measured, as though she’s explaining all this to a child. ‘Herr Hitler has achieved so much in Germany. They say he’s taken two million unemployed off the streets. Well, that’s an achievement, surely? Think what that must mean to people, when they couldn’t feed their families. And he’s wiped away all the shame of the German peoples after Versailles. That treaty was so terrible – the way the German nations got all the blame for the war. He’s made Germany strong and respected again.’ Putting down her cutlery, then taking it up again. ‘There’s a lot of unemployment here in Austria. Well, you’ve seen that. People are struggling. Many Austrians have watched the Third Reich rather enviously. Many Austrians have wanted to be a part of all that.’

I feel a spurt of anger. I’m not going to placate her.

‘What we saw on the street was terrible,’ I say.

‘Yes, of course, Stella, of course it was. Very ugly.’ Cutting her meat in neat slices, and leaving it there on her plate; not eating it. ‘These things are unfortunate, of course. It’s not very pretty – all the rabble-rousing. Perhaps he goes a bit too far, to appease the rowdier elements. But against all that, you have to weigh all the good he has done.’

I open my mouth to speak, but she talks over me.

‘The thing is, my dear, when you’re young, like you, you want things to be perfectly clear. But we live in a fallen world, Stella. There’s always going to be a balance – things to be weighed in the scales.’

She’s been thinking this through all day. She’s managed to persuade herself – stitching her fairytale cottage, in the cloistered sun room that has no view of the street.

‘You have to take the long view,’ she says.

I don’t say anything. I don’t know where to begin.

Janika is sitting at the kitchen table. The sink is piled with the dirty dishes from dinner; she hasn’t begun to wash them. She’s listening to the wireless. She looks up as I go in.