The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (30 page)

‘You should go back to your parents,’ she said. ‘What will you do if you stay here? It will be hard for you to find another job. It’s too risky for you to go on the stage in another club. Your German isn’t good enough for you to find work in an office. You must go home to England and ask your parents for their help. Get together as much money as you can, then when Otto gets out of custody, he can follow you and you can work out what to do next from there.’

I didn’t want to hear it but I knew Marlene was right.

‘But I should wait for Otto to get out of custody first and travel with him.’

A week later, however, Otto had still not been released. I wanted to visit his mother and his sister, but Marlene discouraged me. She said it might cause trouble with Gerd. Instead, she had me write a letter to them – she would make sure they got it – and then she insisted that I wire my parents to arrange my passage home.

Chapter 38

Berlin, last October

The day after I got Marco’s email, I was no closer to knowing what I should do. Fortunately it was the weekend, so that when I woke with eyes all red and puffy from crying, there was no need to worry about what someone might think. I stayed in my pyjamas until lunchtime, rereading Marco’s words and thinking about his conclusion. We were still no closer to being together. Writing the story out had not, as his one-time psychiatrist hoped it might, changed Marco’s mind about the guilt he had carried since 1999. Not even with fifteen years’ reflection. At the time it had driven him to a suicide attempt. Now he just seemed numb. I wasn’t sure that I had the energy to try to make him see things differently again. Neither was I sure I had the right.

I stayed in for most of the day but I had to venture out in the evening because I’d run out of food. I ate dinner alone in a café, oblivious to the Saturday-night revellers around me. I was lost in Marco’s world. Marco’s pain.

Eventually, I wandered back to the Hufelandstrasse.

‘Sarah!’

I was halfway up the stairs when I heard Herr Schmidt call from the dark hallway. ‘Sarah?’

‘Yes, Herr Schmidt.’

‘I wonder if you have some time to talk.’

‘Now?’ I was surprised. It was almost 10 p.m.

‘Yes. If you please.’

His voice sounded wavering. I wondered if he was feeling unwell. I turned and went back down the stairs and followed him into his study, with its warm orange light. He offered to make me some tea. When he turned to go to the kitchen, he seemed unsteady on his legs.

‘Are you feeling OK?’ I asked him.

‘At my age,’ he told me, ‘one very rarely feels OK.’

I insisted on making the tea myself. We sat down, him in his usual chair and me opposite him on the sofa.

‘I need to tell you the truth,’ he said.

I cocked my head to one side.

‘About what?’

‘About my life in Berlin before the war. About the woman to whom those diaries belonged.’

‘I didn’t think you knew her.’

‘Oh, I knew her,’ he said. ‘I was in love with her.’

‘You’re Otto!’ I said. ‘I had my suspicions. I started to think it was you when Kitty described your eyes, the piano-playing, this house . . . Why didn’t you tell me the diaries belonged to your fiancée?’

Herr Schmidt shook his head. ‘If only. My Christian name is Gerd.’

Gerd the Nazi. Gerd the Stormtrooper. It seemed impossible. How could the gentle man I had come to know, who played the piano so beautifully and with such emotion, have been in thrall to such evil?

‘You’re shocked,’ he said.

‘No,’ I lied. I sank back into my chair. ‘I mean . . . yes. Why did you keep her diary?’

‘Because I thought I would see her again one day. I was sure we would meet again face to face. But I haven’t seen her since December 8th 1933.’

Which was the date of the last diary entry, I observed. That morning, Kitty had written about the difficulty of finding the perfect Christmas present for her love.

‘The day after the club was burned, I went to the Hotel Frankfort to find her. I promise you I was going to take her somewhere safer. I was going to send her to a cousin in Munich while I sorted things out. She wasn’t there so I put her things into a shoebox and brought them here.’

‘What happened on the 8th December?’ I asked.

Gerd grew visibly distressed. He took a deep breath that seemed to make his whole body rattle.

‘When I think now
about being a member of the Sturmabteilung, it makes me ill to remember it, but back then, it felt to me as though the SA had given me a purpose in life. I lost my father when I was young. The local mayor took me under his wing because of a favour I’d done him when I was just twelve years old. I pulled his son from a pond. He’d fallen through the ice.

‘After that I was the little hero. When Papa died, the Mayor promised that he would be a father to me and he was. But whereas my father was a compassionate liberal, the Mayor had political views of a very different stripe. He was a member of the Party and he encouraged me to join.

‘I was young. I was fatherless. I had no rudder to help steer me through the difficult waters of adolescence. I could not resist the siren call of an organisation that was offering to be both father and mother to me. I thought my own mother was rather silly. I wish I had known just how strong she really was. She bore all my lectures with humour. She forgave me when I committed the ultimate crime.

‘I was so stupid. My brother, Otto, tried to show me the error of my ways. But I thought it was he who had been corrupted. He was studying to be a lawyer but to raise money for his studies he worked in a nightclub called the Boom Boom. It was a Jewish-owned nightclub for transvestites and gay people. Berlin was very open-minded back then. The Party was not.

‘I was with the group of men who were sent to close the Boom Boom down. I had warned Otto in an oblique way that the moment was coming but I could have done more. I could have told him the very night when we’d be knocking on his door. As it happened, someone else must have tipped them off, because when the show ended, the artists did not even come back on stage for a final bow. They disappeared from the theatre as if by magic. Kitty was with them, of course. It took us a long time to discover the secret passageway that led from the theatre’s cellar through the hotel next door to the U-Bahn.

‘But my brother, he did not escape. While his colleagues slipped away underground and the customers fled at the sight of our guns, he and the double bass player remained. Otto was in front of the stage in the orchestra pit. He just sat there and waited. They were no match for us. My colleagues pulled him from his piano stool and started roughing him up. I was behind the curtain, looking for the man who owned the theatre, when that happened. Apparently, Otto appealed to me to help him. One of my juniors came to find me to ask what should be done next. I had them bring my brother up into the spotlight. Then I stood in front of him. Over him. I wanted to humiliate him. I was still stinging over Kitty. I’d told her I loved her, you see, but she’d never have left Otto for me. I hated him for that. It seemed like the latest in a long line of insults he’d thrown at me. He was always better than me. He was taller, more clever. He made people laugh. At last, in the Boom Boom, I had the chance to be top dog.

‘ “Join the Party,” I told him. “Join the Party and then we’ll know you’re serious about being rehabilitated.”

‘Otto snorted. “I don’t need rehabilitation. I’ll never join your fucking party,” he told me. “Your party is a joke. You prance around interfering with the private lives of perfectly decent people when your leader is the biggest queen this city has ever known.” That was when it all went wrong.

‘He had insulted the Führer. None of my comrades would stand for that. They laid in to him again, pushing me out of the way to get to him. I didn’t join in but I couldn’t tell them to stop. Not when he had breached the ultimate taboo. A Stormtrooper’s duty was to the Führer even above the country. Family came a distant third. I had to let them do it or take a bullet in the head myself. How I wish I’d taken that honourable path.

‘After they had beaten him up, I let them take him away to the police station on some trumped-up assault charge. Later, he was charged again as a pimp under the new law against dangerous habitual criminals. My brother, a pimp. You never heard anything so ridiculous. But it was easy to make it stick because of the nature of the Boom Boom. He was sent to a work camp.’

Herr Schmidt – Gerd Schmidt, as I now knew him – wiped at his tired blue eyes.

‘He died three months later of typhoid.’

‘When I heard that he was dead,’ Herr Schmidt continued the story later on, ‘a part of me died too. I knew I was entirely guilty. I could have saved him that night. He might still be alive. I killed him and since that day I have never allowed myself to have what he could not have. I never married. I never had children. I have never allowed myself to dance or sing or laugh. I never even play happy music. I have tried to live as though I too were dead in the ground.’

Shocked as I was by the circumstances of Otto’s death, I reached out and took Gerd by the hand. He suddenly looked all his ninety-something years. His guilt and pain were etched deep on his face. I could only feel profoundly sorry for him.

‘I was a coward. I was a bully. I was full of envy. I could have saved my brother,’ he said.

‘You didn’t know what would happen to him,’ I said, trying to find an excuse.

‘I could have guessed. I had seen it happen plenty of times before. I should have put a bullet through my head for what I did to my brother, my mother, my sister and Kitty on that evening at the Boom Boom. It was a long time before I realised how wrong I was. Will you find her? Will you let her know that I’m sorry?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

‘You have to do it quickly,’ said Gerd. ‘I don’t think either of us have much time.’

I squeezed his hand again. His bright blue eyes were liquid with tears. I could tell that he was not a man who had cried often, despite his lifetime of grieving, and I did not want to embarrass him. At the same time, I sensed that what he really needed – needed rather than wanted – was a proper, full-on hug. I got up from my seat and half-knelt in front of him so that I could throw my arms round him. The moment my hands closed behind his back, I felt him shudder with a powerful sob.

We stayed like that for a little while, him crying and me just holding him, hoping he would draw strength from my closeness. Eventually I felt him straighten up a little, a subtle signal that I should let him go.

‘I will find her for you,’ I promised. ‘And she will forgive you, I know.’

I don’t know how I knew. I suppose it was the right thing to say. But the funny thing was that, as I said it, I had the strangest feeling it would turn out to be true.

‘You are a good girl, Sarah. And you deserve to have all the happiness I have not allowed myself to have. Promise me that one day you will have a husband and a family.’

‘That’s a promise I can’t make,’ I said. ‘Though I shall certainly wish for it to come true.’

My conversation with Gerd was the impetus I needed. Gerd had spent most of his adult life atoning for what had happened to Otto, but now he was ready to ask forgiveness and move on. Perhaps Marco could get to that place too. I had to help him find it before it was too late.

Though it was late at night and I was tired, I opened up my laptop and began to put down my thoughts. I would not let Marco be so self-indulgent, for, ultimately, that was what it was.

I finished writing to Marco at four o’clock in the morning. I wrote:

Dear Marco,

I still want to see you. Whatever you think, your diary has not changed the way I feel about you except to make me more sure you are a man worthy of love. You have spent the past fifteen years doing penance. Now it’s time to stop. I believe that Silke sent me to you. She sent me to be at your bedside in the hospital and she sent me to you in Venice, to tell you that the time for mourning is over.

Silke did not die because of you, Marco. Your terrible accident was just that: an accident. A split second’s difference in timing and you would have both lived. You would have sat together by the side of the road, shaking with shock at your near miss. You would have clung on to each other and promised never to have such a stupid argument again. Then you would have realised how silly it was to think your friends wouldn’t want to meet her and you would have insisted that she come to London after all and you’d have walked into that party with your head held high and your friends would have loved her. You would have wondered why you ever thought they wouldn’t.

I don’t believe Silke intended to crash the car at all. She didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to kill you. She was in love with you. She wanted to shake you out of your cowardice. That’s all. She just shook too hard. If Silke was anything like the woman I’ve come to know through your diary over the past few nights, then she would have been appalled to think that her momentary expression of frustration and pain could end up hurting you so badly.

Imagine a different outcome. Imagine you had taken her to the party. Imagine you had a wonderful night. The following day you would have driven her to the airport and waved her off, promising to meet again as soon as you could. Perhaps it would have been the start of a wonderful relationship but perhaps you wouldn’t have stayed together for ever. Perhaps she would have left you for someone else. She could have grown up to be a very ordinary woman who would look back on the time you spent together with fondness but nothing more. Perhaps, while her husband snored on the sofa, she would have put down the book she was reading for a moment and remembered you and smiled to herself as she thought about how young and hot-headed you both were.