“But I don’t like other children,” she complained. “They don’t like me. That’s the flaw in your little plan.”
“Then be someone who does like children. Be someone who is likeable.”
“I might as well wish I could fly.”
“Just concentrate on snotty self-confidence. That you can do.”
She pulled a face.
“It’s just school,” he added in a more conciliatory tone.
Sarah hadn’t gone to school. At the start it was a choice. Her mother thought she was too good, too special, too important to mix with children of die Arbeiterklasse. It was only later that she wasn’t allowed to mix with other children. The irony of this was not lost on Sarah. First she had tutors and a governess, then as the money started to run out, her mother taught Sarah herself. This began as an occasional treat and in well-organized and thoughtful sessions, but as her mother’s own work seeped away, Sarah’s education became incessant and frustratingly random. History came from thick dusty tomes on ancient battles, geography from maps of lost empires, and the many, many languages from her mother’s acidic tongue.
And acting. Endless, day and night, unceasing. How to deceive, convince, emote and project. How to focus attention and lose it on demand. How to be someone else until she didn’t know where she ended and the performance began. Sarah began to realize that she was being trained for a career on the stage that she would never have, to play roles in countries she wouldn’t travel to, for people who would never see her. A sense of absence had pricked at the skin under her eyes and at the bridge of her nose, knowing that being with others would make it go away.
She had loathed her loneliness and loathed it now. It was a sign of weakness.
NPEA Rothenstadt was a gothic monstrosity: part castle, part mansion, the diseased imagining of Count Dracula and Dr Frankenstein in the depths of the forest. It would have been comical in the sunshine without the massive flag of the Third Reich draped over the entrance. It dripped genuine menace. As the Captain’s car approached it down the tree-lined avenue, the towers seemed to reach up into the sky like claws, the red flag a tongue. Sarah’s impression that she was walking into the jaws of a sleeping beast was unshakeable.
Use the fear. Fear is an energy. Break it up and build something new.
The car purred into position outside the door. “You get in. You ingratiate yourself” – Sarah opened her mouth, but the Captain silenced her by holding up a hand – “with the target by whatever means necessary. Other than that, enjoy yourself.”
“I don’t enjoy myself,” she said coldly.
“Then pretend to enjoy yourself.” He gestured to the school. “Shall we?”
After the brightness of the day, the entrance hall was a gloomy cave of dark wood panelling and grand staircases, murky portraits and unlit candles. The ceiling stretched up and vanished into darkness that hung like a low rain cloud. Despite the veneer of splendour, the prevailing smell was carbolic soap and boiled cabbage. In the centre of this hallway stood a single tall girl of about sixteen in the uniform of the BDM. She was lit by one shaft of bright sunlight that fell from an unseen window far above and her plaited blonde hair shone. Her polished shoes stood exactly within a white square, Sarah noticed, like the work of a meticulous chess player.
“Heil Hitler.” She saluted and after Sarah raised a cursory arm, she looked at the Captain and waited.
A clock tocked in the silence. After what seemed like too long, he replied, “Indeed. Heil.”
“Herr Haller?”
“Yes.”
“You will follow me, please.” She marched away.
The Captain turned to Sarah. The corners of his mouth flickered and a fire danced in his eyes for just a moment. “Shall we?”
Sarah raised her eyebrows in admonition and waited for him to move. She made a small gesture with her hand and he strode quickly after the girl. Their footsteps clacked and reverberated in the brown darkness.
“Herr Bauer wishes to apologize for the lighting. Preparations for tonight’s vigil require it.” Hers was a voice accustomed to being obeyed.
“Then why is he apologizing?” the Captain replied.
The girl took a misstep but recovered quickly, her cold expression reasserting itself over the sudden fluster. “Herr Bauer is obligated on occasion to make allowances for outsiders.”
The Captain pulled a face like he had been slapped and flashed a grin at Sarah. Stop it, she thought. No, she reconsidered. He’s being Herr Haller.
Who are you being?
A shocked and nervous little girl.
You stop it.
“Wait, please,” said the girl, and she walked the last few metres to a large oak door alone.
The Captain placed a finger on the small of Sarah’s back and tapped gently. “Curtain. Break a leg.”
The headmaster, Bauer, was not comfortably plump or slightly overfed, not jolly, round, nor chubby as some people can be. His particular fatness looked like the result of a deliberate, sustained and highly disciplined over-consumption that had no hint of pleasure in it, and this made it excruciating. Sarah tried to picture the quantities of food necessary for such an experiment, how many families could have been fed instead, but here her imagination failed her. The unceasing sense of hunger that had been a feature of the last few years yawned to life inside her, and she knew instantly that she loathed this man. Sarah knew better than to judge by appearances. Young and old, tall and short, ugly and beautiful, fit and crippled – Sarah knew them to be equally capable of goodness or, in her experience, equally vicious and horrible. But the tiny, hungry little girl inside her howled and stamped her feet at the injustice, at the waste.
A line of sweat was gathering on Herr Bauer’s top lip as he glared at Sarah over his steepled fingers. She had no desire to make eye contact and instead watched the uniformed officer behind him. He, in turn, was absurdly thin, little more than a skeleton covered in skin. The contrast couldn’t have been more pronounced. He was staring straight ahead with such conviction that Sarah was tempted to glance around to see what she was missing. The silence dragged on and she became intensely aware of her hands. Should they be together? No, they should be loose to indicate calm. Don’t move them, dumme Schlampe.
The headmaster sighed heavily. “Herr Haller. We appreciate and respect your desire to have your…niece…admitted to this school. We acknowledge the implied compliment. However, I cannot see any reason why we should accommodate you.”
Sarah frowned. This was supposed to be the easy bit. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might simply not want her.
Don’t let it show, remember who you’re supposed to be.
“Herr Bauer, this is…awkward.” The Captain sat back and looked away as if collecting himself. “Your school came recommended at the highest level. I was only yesterday talking to Herr Bormann—”
The headmaster raised a hand and interrupted. “Herr Haller, spare me your party connections, your wife’s salon guest list and family connections to the Führer. Everyone who wants to send his daughter here claims special status in the new order on the flimsiest of evidence. Do you know how many brothers Hermann Göring must have if everything I’ve heard in this room is true?”
“He has nine siblings. I imagine that makes for quite an extended family, Herr Bauer,” the Captain answered.
Herr Bauer opened his hands and made a dismissive gesture. “My point remains, I invite everyone to make that angry telephone call to his powerful friends, should those friends actually exist. This school is exclusively for the cream of the next generation of German women. Your niece’s provenance is basic at best.” He fingered the papers on his desk with indifference. “Your importance to the Reich is equally nebulous. I’m sure” – he rolled his eyes theatrically – “that you have been blessed financially and your munificence would be boundless, but it isn’t about that, is it? It’s about purity, intelligence and brilliance, strength and power. Exactly what does your frankly undersized niece have to offer us?”
“I can play that piano.”
Everyone looked at Sarah. She’d had enough of being talked about like she wasn’t there. She pointed at the grand piano in the corner of the office.
Herr Bauer snorted. “I can play the piano.”
“Not like me.” She stared right into his tiny eyes and wanted to retch.
Herr Bauer licked his lips slowly, then clicked a podgy index finger towards the piano. “Be my guest.”
Sarah got up from her chair slowly, remembering to smooth her skirt as she did so and then clasp her hands demurely in front of her. She’d felt goaded by the man’s disdain and was now unsure of herself. She felt her legs moving heavily as if through syrup and the air seemed stale and close. She could see now that there was no music on the stand, nothing to suggest what might be acceptable. What did she know by heart? She went through her repertoire, rejecting each piece as unsuitable, an endless string of cabaret numbers penned by Jews and undesirables. Wagner, wasn’t he the Führer’s favourite? Something you know, idiot. She arrived at the piano without an idea in her head.
It was a beautiful Grotrian-Steinweg just like her mother’s – polished, dusted and untouched. Sarah could almost see the golden-haired toddler looking back at her from its flawless curves.
She reached out and let her fingers brush across it as she passed. Little cloudy trails blossomed and evaporated in their wake. Think. She lifted the front top board and slid the music shelf aside. The elegant golden plate shone back at her. Someone’s life had been made miserable to keep the inside of the instrument this spotless.
As her mother had slipped slowly down into bitterness and depression, their piano had suffered at her hands. The always- open top board had caught the spills and refuse of a dozen tantrums, the strings had clogged with fluff and cigarette ends. When they finally fled to Austria, it had become an unrecognizable pile of empty spirit bottles and overflowing ashtrays. Sitting down in front of this fiercely clean instrument was like stepping back in time to when her mother smiled more and snarled less, when the apartment was full of laughter instead of broken glass. The thought was a spear through Sarah’s heart.
She lifted the lid and her hands hovered over the keys. She thought she could see her mother’s face in the music stand, warmer, calmer and younger than it had been, head rocking gently back and forth, each motion timed to the left hand chord and imperceptibly circling from side to side to the motion of her right hand.
Sarah found her fingers playing and her foot marking time on the pedals. A gentle and slow waltz was emerging, melancholy and darkly vague, punctuated by almost random drops of high notes, like falling spring rain across the minor bass chords. Raindrops that streak across the windowpane, barely making their presence felt, but ruining the day. The notes sustained into the distance and fell away but reappeared with a slicing suddenness, in the wrong places but at the right time. As the jagged circular melody spiralled round her arms, Sarah felt the box deep inside her split open and the fear, the sadness and the loneliness seeped over the edges. She caught her breath and wanted to stop, but couldn’t. The notes unpicked her stitches as her fingers travelled right and left. In her mind’s eye her mother’s head was still rocking to the slow offbeat tempo, but above her hairline her deep red locks were now a mess of blood and glass.
A hand slammed down onto the music rack with such force that Sarah jumped back with a yelp.
The thin uniformed officer was standing over her, a look of disgust on his face. Sarah tried to calm her quaking shoulders as the last discordant notes resonated in the silence.
“Satie was a French degenerate. His experiments in Modernism and Dada were a sickness, the fumblings of a Bolshevist. Where did you learn such filth?” the officer barked.
Inside Sarah was rapidly stuffing, closing, locking and hiding the box, desperately putting her fears away, conscious of a much more immediate threat. She could not admit to any more weakness. Attack is the secret of defence; defence is the planning of an attack.
“My father always said that. This is my mother’s favourite piece, but she was a very sick woman,” she said quietly and waited, unblinking.
Captain Floyd’s voice could be heard on the other side of the room. “Ursula’s mother was a long time away from the Fatherland. You see now why I’m so insistent that she gets an appropriate National Socialist education.”
The uniformed officer looked back at the headmaster and spoke. “You will ensure that this girl learns only German music. Music appropriate to her talents.”
Herr Bauer shrugged and looked away. “If you insist, Klaus.”
“I do.” The officer turned back to Sarah, who didn’t know if she had been dismissed. After a moment, he held out a handkerchief. She regarded the fold of white cotton but found she couldn’t move, unable to square this action with the distaste in his expression. Eventually, he tutted and reached for her face. She screamed on the inside as he clasped her chin firmly between his thumb and forefinger and he deftly wiped her one errant tear away.
He stepped aside and strode from the room. Sarah realized he smelled of oranges.
The headmaster sighed and stared at his desk. “Taking a new girl so far into the term, most inconvenient…unprepared for expenses, extra bed and board…”
“If money were an object, Herr Bauer, I would leave Ursula in the local Realschule,” declared the Captain, standing. “Make the arrangements.”
“Klaus will be delighted to have another pianist attending,” the headmaster mumbled wearily.
Outside, the early evening sun was especially bright, the breeze especially wholesome, as if it were made for the cream of German womanhood. The Captain turned away from the car, where a wizened old man was struggling with Sarah’s suitcase.
“Ursula, a little walk, I think.”
“Certainly, Onkel.”
They ambled with an intense casualness along the front of the school. It was bereft of flower beds, bushes or anything colourful. Even the grass seemed muted.
“You play very well. I didn’t know that about you,” the Captain said, something approaching admiration in his voice.
“There’s lots you don’t know. I think it might be comforting to know you have limits. Anyway, a lady must have some secrets.”
“I just wish you’d played something else. Wagner or something?”
“Oh yes, Wagner is very big in Jewish show-business families.”
“You were lucky that our new friend is a patron of the arts.”
Sarah shivered. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” he replied with unusual candour. “I haven’t come across him before.”
“More ignorance. Mmm…this isn’t so comforting after all.” She spoke with more humour than she felt.
“I’ll find out.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. “In the meantime, keep him sweet. Learn your Wagner.”
They turned the corner of the building. “You’re leaving me here, then,” she said softly.
“That was the plan.”
She felt she was being lowered into a pit of snakes. She needed reassurance from the person holding the rope.
“That man – he’s one of your unnecessary uniforms.”
“Yes, he is.”
“And that’s why I’m here?”
“In a way.”
They followed the path as it angled away from the school towards a chapel. The courtyard was deserted, but Sarah still felt the need to look over her shoulder.
“What I’m doing here…if I stay in this place…I’m freeing Germany?”
The Captain was about to be flippant, she could see it in his eyes, but something in her face gave him pause.
“You want to leave?” he asked gently.
Sarah took a deep breath and pushed her hands deep into her coat pockets, eyes on the ground. “I didn’t say that. I just…” She looked up and tried to make sense of his glazed eyes. “I just want to be sure that it’s important.”
“How important do you want to be?” The flippancy leaked out.
Sarah stamped a foot and hissed, “I don’t want to be some skeleton’s piano monkey unless you really need me to be. Does Germany really need me to be? Getting in this man’s house – it’s that important?”
He held his palms out. “There’s nothing in Hans Schäfer’s office. He’s moved everything to his estate. It’s locked down tight. Guarded day and night.”
“And he’s making the Grapefruit Bomb?” she insisted.
“Maybe. Whatever he’s doing, it scared Professor Meitner. Nothing scares Lise Meitner. That…disturbs me,” he finished softly.
“And you really think I can walk up to this Elsa Schäfer and get you an invitation to her father’s house?”
“Maybe,” he conceded.
She rubbed at her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “That’s a lot of maybes.”
“There always are.”
A cloud passed over the sun. Sarah bit her lip. “What if I mess up?”
“Then I take you home.”
“Home?” Sarah laughed. A box room and a fake name. Not enough. “No, I mean what if they discover who I am?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“More maybes?”
“Yes.”
So many uncertainties. Sarah pulled a shoe through the gravel in a long line. “Have you ever used the floating edge?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“What is it in English? The…balance beam.”
He shook his head. She stepped onto the mark she had made and, hitching up her pleated skirt slightly, moved her arms behind her, palms up. Slowly, she raised one leg until it touched her face, so she was balancing on the other leg, her foot motionless on the line.
“Just eight centimetres wide, the width of your foot if you’re lucky…” she explained.
Raising her arms above her head, she swept the leg down and behind her, until it was at right angles to her body.
“It moves as you do, so you have to predict it. Ride it.” Her voice sounded strained, tense even to her own ears. “You’ve walked it endlessly, eyes closed, fallen off over and over, until you can move through the programme seamlessly…readjusting your balance with your muscles, your toes, never your feet…”
She arched her back and bent her outstretched leg. Reaching over her head, she closed her hands over her foot.
“All the while you’re being watched, judged, dismissed,” she continued. “It’s tempting to rush it, but you can’t and you have to commit to the move. If you panic, you’re gone.
“Normally, you’re a metre from the floor, high enough to break or snap something if you don’t fall well. But I used to practise on the banisters at home once they threw me out of class. I had to finish, had to be perfect, because the fall was three metres on one side.”
She released her foot and tipped forward, until she was leaning over, balanced by her outstretched leg, before straightening up.
“That’s where I am now, aren’t I? Except the banister is wet. And the floor is on fire.”
“Very poetic.” He didn’t seem to know what else to say.
“‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth’, Captain Floyd.”
He threw his head back and laughed, a big bright thing that echoed off the school building. It made Sarah smile for its unexpectedness.
“Sarah of Elsengrund, play your part with more care. Good National Socialist girls don’t quote Picasso, or play Satie. You’ve got to be a good dumb little monster now.”
“Yes, sir.” She clicked her heels together. Playing a part. Doing it well. This was familiar ground.
The sun re-emerged from behind the chapel. Sarah noticed something and walked towards it. Attached to the front of a dark glass window in the transept was a stone carving of three hares. They were running in a circle, each chasing the tail of the next, somersaulting up and over one another so that their ears were connected at the centre.
“Oh,” she chirped. “The three hares. It’s on…it was on the synagogue in Karlshorst.”
“I thought you didn’t go to the synagogue.”
“I didn’t go to synagogue, doesn’t mean I never went to a synagogue. Why is it here?”
“For Christians it stands for the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In the Kabbalah, the three levels of the soul. You can find them on churches and shrines from the Silk Road to Great Britain.”
“Der Hasen und der Löffel drei,
Und doch hat jeder Hase zwei,” Sarah sang quietly. Three hares sharing three ears, yet every one of them has two… She shivered again and cocked her head to one side before continuing. “You know, the Jews are supposed to be the hares. I guess the National Socialists are the dogs. The Jews are persecuted, hunted, hated, but they can run and dodge and you can’t wipe them out.”
“I suspect they’re going to try.”