Читать книгу A Woman of War: A new voice in historical fiction for 2018, for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Mandy Robotham - Страница 16

I ate breakfast the next morning in the servants’ quarters. I was introduced as Fräulein Braun’s companion, yet no one asked where I had come from, or about my life during or before the war; everyone’s history, it seemed, had been washed away by the turmoil.

We had agreed I would see Fräulein Braun briefly each morning after breakfast, and once a week for a full check. In between, I would see her only if she needed me or had questions – this was all made clear in my first meeting with Sergeant Meier, who proudly introduced himself as I returned to my room.

‘And I needn’t make it clear you cannot leave the complex without Fräulein Braun,’ he added, ‘or her express permission – in writing.’

He gave a reluctant smile, his small, neat moustache rippling, wire-rimmed glasses sitting astride a short, pointed nose, topped by oiled, cropped hair. His creeping arrogance and the way he wore his sombre SS jacket made me shiver; I had seen a hundred SS guards wielding heavy coshes, lined up before a thousand powerless women. Before the war, this man had been small and insignificant. Conflict had granted him gravitas, and he basked in it.

‘Given where I have come from, Sergeant, I’m under no illusions about my place here,’ I said. ‘I’m still a prisoner, engaged in slave labour, however you want to dress it.’

‘Very comfortable slave labour, Fräulein,’ he said without skipping a beat. ‘Just remember that. And your family. Good day.’

The rest of January and into February passed slowly. The house was quiet, and I could only assume its chief resident was conducting the war from elsewhere. Fräulein Braun and I soon settled into a routine: I would go to her room after breakfast, enquire about her night, how the baby was moving, and if she wanted me to listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Once or twice a week I performed a full check, with her blood pressure and urine. She was healthy and there were no obvious problems.

The weather was bitterly cold, but on clear days the views were spectacular across the wide valleys below the house, and I was itching to venture further afield. Strangely, though, I never once thought of talking my way past the guards and out into the world. At times, it didn’t feel like a prison; I was treated with respect by Fräulein Braun, engaged in conversation with the other servants, and was tolerated by Frau Grunders. It was the constant spectre of my family’s future that kept me in check. If there was the tiniest chance that my compliance would allow even one of them to survive, it was a small price to pay.

I spent hours wrapped in my blanket in the corner of the wide, stone terrace attached to the main house, drinking in the winter sun and reading. On still days, the space was dotted with tables and striped sun umbrellas, giving it the feeling of a hidden and exclusive resort hotel. Fräulein Grunders had granted me blissful access to her bookshelves, and I was hungrily eating my way through volumes of German and English classics – Austen and Goethe, Dickens and Thomas Mann. The skies buzzed with small aircraft, possibly fighters, but up here, surrounded by the purest air, there was no hint of a war raging across the world; our cotton clouds bore no resemblance to the gun smoke below.

The war, in fact, seemed a lifetime away. Aside from the young jackboots who patrolled the complex, smoking in their breaks, there was no hint of anything untoward in the world at all. They were bored and eager to chat, wearing the guns slung across their shoulders like elaborate trinkets. In the camp, we’d had scant news from the outside world – only when a new inmate had been brought in did we learn which borders had fallen, or what new countries had been occupied. There were no newspapers, nothing by which we could judge our place in the great scheme. I presumed it was intentional, since our ignorance contributed to the regime of fear, to their ability to leverage our lives, and that of our families. Anything to isolate our humanity.

High on up in the Bavarian hills, we also seemed to be in a news black spot. I sometimes glimpsed a newspaper on Sergeant Meier’s desk and harboured a ravenous hunger for the print on its pages. But I also knew it was pure propaganda – as the daughter of a politics professor I had been taught to have a healthy disrespect for the media. ‘In the pocket of the politicos,’ was one of my father’s more familiar groans. ‘Always read between the lines, Anke. Accept nothing on face value.’ Any Nazi newspaper these days – slavishly controlled by Goebbels – was more fiction than fact.

In the servants’ hall, there was a small radio set, one of the Reich’s People Receivers, but it was rarely switched on, and conversation was limited to enquiring about immediate family who weren’t away in the war, or the plentiful meal in front of us. In fact, everything about the Berghof made it seem as though the war was an elaborate figment of our imaginations: the quality of the furnishings, the luxuries of soap, shampoo and even shoe polish, which were refreshed in my room regularly.

Inevitably, my waist started to fill out, my ribs gaining a fleshy coating, so that I could no longer tap on them like a xylophone and produce an echo. In the mirror, I noted a subtle change in my face, a gradual colouring coming into more rounded cheeks, and my hair became thicker, acquiring a slight sheen. I looked almost healthy. It was the old Anke I saw, but not one I recognised. My outer and inner selves were at strange odds with each other.

On one or two occasions that month, I was allowed to go further afield. Fräulein Braun usually took a walk after breakfast with her terriers, Negus and Stasi – I often saw her heading through the perimeter fence and along a path linking another hilltop area. One morning, after our usual meeting, she asked if I would like to go with her. When I said I didn’t have a coat, she looked slightly taken aback, and fished in her wardrobe for one that might fit me.

‘There, that should keep you nice and warm,’ she said, beaming, and for a split second the atmosphere was almost sisterly, as if we’d been swapping gossip for hours, teasing each other’s hair into the latest style.

Eva donned her sunglasses against the bright, white sun beating out to warm the icy air. Our breaths left brief trails as we headed down the frosty path, followed at a discreet distance by an armed guard, with the dogs gambolling on ahead. Conversation was stilted at first, given that there were few topics on which we could share, and many off limits. In the circles she mixed, she had picked up a certain amount of tact in chattering diplomatically, almost about nothing. We talked about some of our favourite films, our school days, and she told me a little about her family, whom she clearly missed. Her sister, Gretl, was often at the Berghof, since she was engaged to a senior officer in the SS, but she rarely saw her older sister, Ilse. When I revealed I had a sister of the same name, she smiled and seemed genuinely pleased we had a small thing in common. She stopped short of asking where my own Ilse was, and how she fared.

‘So, tell me about when you were working in Berlin, and the babies you delivered,’ she said, eager to know. ‘I often think it must be a lovely job. I think, if things had been different, I might have been drawn into nursing, or something like that.’ That was as far she came to alluding to the war and its catastrophic effect on the entire world below us, and not for the first time it made me question her true knowledge, or her willingness to ask.

I told her some of the positive stories about birth, of the quirkier events, but nothing of the downsides, the times when it could go wrong, and the emergencies we might have to deal with. The bitter part of me might have hinted at those, but it was an unspoken rule among midwives that we didn’t dwell on the negative side. After all, what was the point? Pregnant women were set on a journey, through the winding hours of labour and into motherhood, with no option of taking a shortcut. Why would I reveal it was potentially fraught with danger, reaffirming the old German view of childbirth as infected with jeopardy? As midwives, we knew intense fear could stop a labour in its tracks, with resulting consequences. We needed mothers to welcome it into their bodies, as much as anyone could invite pain and discomfort. Over endless hours of watching and waiting with women in labour, I was a firm believer that anxiety was our enemy, a generous dose of humour being the best medicine.

It took us half an hour to reach a turning point, a little clearing cut into the trees with a rectangular building on one end, part brick and part wood, becoming circular at the other end. Windows looked out onto the expanse below, across the border and into Austria. The dogs barked our arrival.

‘Quiet, you rascals!’ Eva chided them playfully.

The building was one main room, with the circular ante-room visible through an open door. Comfortable chairs were dotted around the walls and the wood floors covered with expensive rugs.

‘We call this the Teehaus,’ said Fräulein Braun, as the dogs flopped onto their embroidered cushions. She was pleased to be playing the hostess. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

She beamed as she offered me tea from a little stove, pre-lit and set for her trip – making her regular morning walks anything but arduous – and talked as she filled the cups.

‘We come here and take tea on some afternoons. On a clear day you can see for ten miles or so. The view is breath-taking.’ She didn’t look at me but the ‘we’ was heavily weighted for my benefit.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, as if I was in some kind of fairy tale myself.

‘Goodness!’ she said suddenly, as we finished our tea. ‘Time to head back. Frau Grunders will be calling for lunch and wondering where we are.’

I mused on what might be calling her away – to my knowledge, she hadn’t left the house in weeks. I’d overheard some of the maids gossiping about how full the Berghof used to be with a constant stream of guests. The social whirl, however, had stopped abruptly, no doubt at the Goebbels’ bidding. Eva flashed a naughty child’s grin, inviting me to be complicit in her mild mockery of the housekeeper, and I smiled back as a reflex. Unwittingly, Frau Grunders had helped us forge a small alliance.