The kilometres wound down. Sarah slept poorly, jerking awake with a miserable, sapping regularity. Now the dream dogs and bullies were joined by faceless, pawing beasts that smelled of musk. Sad-eyed boys walked into a fiery hell as she watched. But Sarah defied them all by closing her eyes and starting again.
Finally, the outskirts of Berlin rose into view in the headlights. The chocolate box sweetness of rural Germany seeped into suburbs, but vanished as absurdly theatrical National Socialist architecture crushed the city.
Sarah was nearly home. She closed her eyes again because she didn’t want to see it.
The Captain gently shook Sarah’s shoulder. “I can’t carry you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I’m not strong enough yet.”
She looked at him as if for the first time that night. His brow was sweaty. His cheeks were still hollow and under the street light, his skin was the colour of concrete. The hours of driving had evidently been a challenge. What if he’s never better? Her selfishness surprised her. Then her brain went quiet again: a building in which all the lights had been shut off. She let him guide her.
The steps. The mathematically perfect path to the door.
She was home. It was over. Whatever else was to happen, whatever else she had to deal with following the past few months, it could wait until she’d slept.
In a soft bed with clean white sheets, in a heated apartment with a locked door, with soft white bread and garlic sausage for breakfast.
The concierge was gone, a festive tree in his place. The lift sat invitingly open, a little doorway to safety. They closed the gate against the world, its predators, bullies and psychopaths, its zealots, victims and onlookers. She leaned against him, as he leaned against the wall.
They rose and Sarah’s spirit rose too. Everything could wait for tomorrow.
Carpeted corridors, patterned wood. The scent of varnish and clean floors. Keys moving smoothly in a well-oiled lock. Then into the darkness within, the space lit only by the Berlin skyline as the Captain locked the door behind her. It smelled of home, and oranges.
Sarah stopped dead, her senses suddenly alive. What? What?
“Merry Christmas, Herr Haller. Fräulein.”
The Captain turned on the lights.
Sturmbannführer Klaus Foch was sitting in the Captain’s armchair in his dress uniform. He was cradling a Luger pistol, which he pointed at them. “I hope you don’t mind me letting myself in.”
“I can only apologize that I wasn’t here to meet you, Sturmbannführer… I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me of your name.” The Captain walked nonchalantly to the sideboard and lit a cigarette. “However, it’s late and I’m very tired. Why are you here?”
Sarah stayed still, watching, thinking, shaking her instincts back into action. It didn’t feel fair. She hadn’t known or prepared. She was supposed to be safe. She had suffered enough and with the lights on, she could see it in the window. Her reflection was so small, so brutalized, so bizarre.
“I thought you were just a typical capitalist parasite, growing fat on the work of the party. But your sudden… acquisition of such a talented ward – it piqued my curiosity.”
The Captain examined his eye in a nearby mirror and adjusted his hair. He’s flanking him, thought Sarah. But he’s not fit enough to fight.
“I’m a businessman,” said the Captain into the mirror. “When the Führer wanted a wireless set in every home, he needed someone to make that happen. It didn’t happen by beating up Jews or smashing their windows. I was happy to leave that to people like you.” It was like a public speech.
He’s playing for time. Sarah took a few steps to her left as Foch glared at the Captain. She rounded an armchair as if she might sit in it. Foch fished out a notebook and read from it.
“Helmut Haller…seems to have appeared from nowhere just after the last war. No home town, no family to speak of, until suddenly” – he fixed Sarah with a piercing glance – “a niece. A sister I can’t find, married to someone with a strangely incomplete military file. It’s all very coincidental, don’t you think?”
Sarah swayed a few steps further to the left, as if bored. She’d taken off the riding boots in the car so she was able to step silently on the polished floor. She was now level with Foch. He couldn’t quite watch her and the Captain at the same time.
That was when she noticed it. It was covered in a spotless dustsheet and she had assumed it was furniture piled for cleaning, but now she realized what it was.
“My sister and I were orphans, Sturmbannführer. We did appear from nowhere.” He was dismissive, as if arguing with a bookkeeper. “She is now in a lunatic asylum, a fact you can imagine I don’t share at cocktail parties. As for her poor husband, if the Luftwaffe can’t do its own filing, I’m certainly not to blame. Is this how the Gestapo works now? Sending former stormtroopers to do the snooping?”
“Not at all. The Gestapo have apparently missed all of this,” he sneered. “Typical SS, all preening and no work.”
Mistake. He’s come here on his own, thought Sarah. The Captain’s going to kill him, right here. He needs a distraction.
She pulled the dustsheet off slowly at first, but it gathered pace and dropped away to the floor with a hiss.
Foch looked at her but saw nothing untoward.
“Anyway, the most glaring mistake of all…” Foch replaced his notebook and levelled his gun at the Captain. Then he pointed at Sarah with his free hand. “Was her. Ursula Bettina Haller. Until three months ago, she didn’t exist. There’s a birth certificate in the name of Elsengrund and it’s an excellent fake, but you’re fooling nobody. She’s the weak link,” he crowed.
It had a large silk ribbon and bow wrapped over its lid. It was a Christmas gift. It was her Christmas gift.
“So you’re here to arrest me?” the Captain scoffed.
“Not at all. I’m here to put a bullet in your head and take her away.” The coldness of it was shocking.
Foch stood and took aim.
The Captain was too far from the gun to do anything. For the first time since the jetty so many months ago, Sarah saw in his face a cornered animal.
Sarah was standing on the ferry again, watching the gangplank rising, but there was no lake to cross this time and no choice to make.
Sarah turned to her gift. She slammed her hands down onto the keys of the butterfly grand piano, a big two-handed C minor chord with the sustain pedal down.
Foch turned in surprise.
“Do you think Gretel would be happy with this?” Sarah interjected.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
“With me taking her place? You think if I can play the piano for you, for ever, you can pretend she’s still here. But she isn’t, is she?” Sarah pushed, an edge to her voice.
“Shut up,” he growled. The gun wavered between Sarah and the Captain.
Under the uniform, he was fragile and weak. She had to keep him talking, keep his attention. She started to play a Satie piece.
“What are you doing? Satie is—” he complained, trying to reassert himself.
“Shush,” insisted Sarah. The high notes hailed a coming darkness. Her left hand marked the sluggish marching beat. It was the sound of a black and terrible thing, emerging slowly but inevitably, just behind a door. Foch kept the gun on the Captain but he couldn’t keep his attention there. “If I’m going to be taking her place, I want to do it right, so I need to know. Who is Gretel?”
Foch seemed to curl up inside himself. He listened to the piano but watched the Captain down the barrel of the Luger.
Sarah came to the end of the first piece and moved seamlessly into the second, more melancholy melody. Now each note pushed the piece forward with a sigh.
“What happened to her?” Sarah asked softly.
Just when Sarah thought she’d lost him, he began to talk.
“When Heydrich’s men came for me, I was at home. They came for everyone at home or on holiday, when they were relaxed and vulnerable. I was in the drawing room, listening to…my daughter…playing the piano…”
“Gretel.” Sarah nodded, bobbing her head in time with the gentle rippling of the music. The Captain watched the gun, waiting for it to move, for Foch’s attention to stray.
“Gretel was…an imbecile. She was a small child in the body of a young woman. She couldn’t read, or write, and she looked…but she could play. When she played the piano you couldn’t tell…you couldn’t – you wouldn’t know…”
“If you stood behind her.” A great wound had opened inside her. Sarah thought she knew what had happened but realized that she wasn’t actually ready to hear it. She wanted to stop, but her pity ran as deep as her hatred and she couldn’t deny Foch the confession.
“They came in through the French windows. Gretel was frightened… I pleaded with them – I was a good National Socialist, I wasn’t one of Röhm’s lackeys. I told them they were mistaken, that I was loyal to the Führer…and they said…they said…”
She could see him about to crumble.
Sarah began the third piece. She wanted to stop and cover her ears, but she couldn’t.
“And they said, how could I be a National Socialist and let something like that live?”
She could have prevented him finishing his tale, but it would still have happened. She felt the horror approaching like a distant train on a quiet night, an oncoming sense of loss and regret that she could hardly bear. Some secrets should stay secret after all, she thought. A tear slid down Sarah’s cheek and she tried to sniff it away.
“So they gave me a choice,” he said unevenly.
Sarah’s playing slowed and the tempo drifted away.
Please don’t be true, please say you didn’t…
“I could live, but I had to make a – sacrifice for the Reich…” His voice began to disintegrate. “Gretel was crying, she didn’t understand. They gave me a pistol… I asked her to play…and she played so well, even though she was sobbing… I told her she was a good girl…”
Sarah finished. There were no more notes to play. The gun still pointed at the Captain but shook in Foch’s hand as he rocked, face wet. She didn’t want to care.
“And?” Sarah said as gently as she could.
“And,” he whispered, “I put the pistol to the back of her head and did my duty for the Reich.”
“You shot her. While she played.” Sarah said this slowly.
“I was doing my duty…” he whispered. The gun trembled. Not enough…
“You saved your skin. What does Gretel think of you now?”
Foch straightened in his chair and took aim at the Captain.
NO.
“Vati? There are men here, they say they’ve come to take you away.” Sarah had no idea what Gretel sounded like, but she had once met a girl who her mother had called a “Mongoloid”. The voice came effortlessly, like she’d started up one of her mother’s records. “If I play the piano, will the men go away, Vati?”
“Silence!” he screamed, now staring right at her.
Sarah began playing Beethoven, something Gretel would have played. The “Mondscheinsonate”, the “Moonlight Sonata”.
“I’m playing for you – am I playing well, Vati? Why are you angry with me? Did I do something wrong?” Sarah hated him, hated having to wade into his filth, to defile the ghost of that poor child. At the same time, allowing Gretel to use her voice opened a vein of loss and misery that she couldn’t control. The words tumbled from her mouth.
“Stop.” Now the gun pointed at her.
“What are you doing, Vati? Please don’t. Don’t kill me, Vati.” With the pistol aimed at her, she realized he might kill Gretel all over again. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, but while the thought was frightening, she was swamped by the sadness of it. Tears filled Sarah’s eyes and began to gather in her throat. Betrayed and deserted by a father. By two fathers.
“Shut – up.” The gun moved slowly away. No—
“Why did you kill me, Vati? Why?” She let her voice fill with her own feelings of loneliness and sadness, crying for Gretel, crying for herself.
“I didn’t want to. They made me,” wailed Foch, looking to the Captain for support, who had frozen mid-movement.
“You didn’t want to?” She let her voice sound disappointed, offended. “That makes me sad. I’m so sad, Vati. It’s so cold where I am.”
“I’m sorry, Gretel.” He sagged down into the armchair, holding the gun up as if it was a great weight.
Sarah closed the piano lid and walked gently towards him.
“Will you hold me one more time, Vati? I forgive you. Let me show that I forgive you for what you did.”
“I’m so, so sorry…” He looked Sarah in the face. He didn’t see Gretel. He just needed forgiveness.
Sarah bent and wrapped her arms around him where he sat. “It’s all right, I forgive you. Just hold me. Then it’ll all be all right.” Sarah felt his arms close around her and something hot, like scalding bathwater, splash across her face. He jerked and there was a sucking noise.
“Shh…” Sarah whispered. Hold on a minute.
The hot liquid kept sloshing onto her face, running down her neck, soaking into her stock shirt. “Shh…” Just a few more seconds.
Okay. Now.
She let go of Foch and he collapsed in front of her. She couldn’t see his body reflected in the window, but she could see the Captain, knife in hand. She could also see herself, painted top to toe in Foch’s blood, as the dawn sky lightened behind.
She felt nothing at all.
Then the box of horrors disintegrated, flooding its chamber and breaking over Sarah like a wave.
She curled up on the floor, in the blood.
She wanted to cry: for the lost like the Mouse, for the ruined like Elsa, for the dead like her mother and Gretel, as well as those she had killed like Stern or even Foch. But right now she could only cry for herself.