Necessary Lies(76)

Anna sits down, carefully, and watches the steam rise from the cups, a tiny whirlpool of warm air, the thin slices of Apflestrudel arranged on a Meissen plate, the cotton napkins, pale beige, embroidered in one corner, ironed and impeccably folded. Monika is holding out the plate, waiting for Anna to pick a warm slice of cake. The smell of cinnamon reaches Anna’s nostrils, the smell of the apple pie William warmed the day he died.

She must look pale, for both Monika and Frau Strauss are asking her if she is all right. They offer to open the window, and Anna nods, taking a deep breath that brings some colour back to her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It must be the travelling. So much is happening. I don’t get much sleep.” She takes a few sips of tea and a bite of cake.

The photographs on the table are small, with fancy jagged edges. “This here is K?the. And this, this is Willi.” Frau Strauss says. At seven William has short hair and a shy smile. He is wearing knee-high shorts and a knitted vest. In another picture K?the and Frau Strauss, in berets, their trench coats tightly wrapped around their waists, are standing together, arms linked. Two young, smiling faces.

“You can have these,” Monika says. “Please take them. For K?the. We have doubles.”

“K?the will be very happy,” Anna says, “Danke. Danke sch?n”

“How is she?” Frau Strauss asks. A gift for K?the is waiting on the armchair. It is carefully wrapped up in red paper and tied with a golden ribbon.

“Frail,” Anna says. “But she’ll be all right. She doesn’t give up.”

Frau Strauss nods slowly, with approval, as if she expected nothing less from her friend.

“It’s terrible about Willi” she says. “I still can’t believe it. He always had so much life in him. He was still so young!” Frau Strauss says, wiping tears off her cheeks. “The last time he was here, he showed us a musical box he had just bought. A really old Austrian one, with bells. My father had a similar one in Breslau. But Willi! It was as if he were a little child again. He wound it up and we all listened. Lorelei waltz.”

In one of the photographs on the table William is surrounded by children, two girls and a boy, showing them something, for they all lean forward, enraptured. He is slimmer than Anna has ever seen him and he has no beard. Clean shaven, his face looks younger, but also less familiar. These are Monika’s children, Anna learns, and William is showing them a boomerang. Right before the picture was taken he had told them that this bent piece of stick would come back when they learned to throw it the right way. Kurt, Monika’s oldest son, wouldn’t believe him, so William took them all to the field, threw the boomerang, and it came back.

“You should have seen Kurt’s face then,” Monika says. “He can still remember it.”

“That’s Willi,” Frau Strauss says, “That’s how I remember him.”

In the story that Monika sometimes helps to translate in her clear, though accented English, William is still Willi, a little German boy, crying for the red telephone he had to leave behind. When they were told to flee, Frau Strauss explains, the children were only allowed one toy, and Willi took his tambourine. But, choices like that are never final, nicht wahr? Here, in Berlin, it was the lost telephone he craved, the ring it made, the shine of its chrome dial. He was so silent and polite, then, a bit frightened, watching people for a long time before he would say anything. He took a long time to decide whom to trust. Frau Strauss remembers giving him cigarette cards that he lined up on the table and arranged in different ways. He could play like that for hours.

“But we mustn’t be sad,” Frau Strauss says, waving her hand as if she were fighting off an annoying fly. “We must be grateful for what we have.”

“K?the wrote that you were from Breslau, too. I thought it was quite incredible, really, that you and Willi met.” It’s Monika who says that, shaking her head. The thought seems to please her, like a completed circle, a missing piece of a puzzle.

At the sound of the word Breslau, Frau Strauss rises and rushes into another room from which she emerges with albums of old postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings. “Look,” she says, with girlish excitement. “Look here!” She points to the sights Anna can immediately recognise, but only as their later, tarnished and incomplete selves. “Jahrhundrethalle,” she says, “designed by Max Berg. Bigger than the Pantheon, Vati always said. Blücherplatz, my father took me there. Mit Gott, für K?nig una Vaterland, that’s what it said, on the monument... Stadttheater, a stepping stone to Berlin. Such excellent actors! Liebichsh?he with such beautiful flowers and fountains, and the glorietta tower from which you got a view of the whole of Breslau. There was such a fine furniture store on the ground level, Innen Dekoration W. Quintern & Co. I remember! We used to go there with K?the.”

“Now, it’s called Partisans’ Hill,” Anna says. She wants to say that the glorietta tower was blown up by the German defence, in 1945, but Frau Strauss is not listening.

Frau Strauss recalls a restaurant on the Oder and a big metal rooster that stood there. With thick black lines where the feathers should be. She used to put a 10 pfennig coin into a slot in the rooster’s back and a metal egg would fall from the rooster’s belly. Inside there were bonbons. Lemon, cherry, strawberry.

“Oh Mutti,” Monika interrupts, laughing softly. “Now, she will never stop,” she says turning to Anna.