Roots of Evil(104)

Michael said, ‘You didn’t find anything else relating to Lucretia among Trixie’s things?’

‘No.’ Fran drained her wine glass and set it down. ‘But I didn’t actually open envelopes or read letters. This was just in a pack of old photographs – it didn’t seem especially private.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Michael – earlier tonight you said that after Alraune came to England there was a marriage.’

‘Yes, but it was a very unhappy marriage,’ said Michael. ‘I lived with Alraune until I was eight.’


Francesca looked at him. ‘Alraune was your mother,’ she said carefully. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Lucretia von Wolff was your grandmother, and Alraune was her daughter. So Alraune must have been your mother.’

For a moment she thought he was not going to answer and the silence stretched out and threatened to become embarrassing.

Then he reached for his jacket, which was on the back of the chair, took out his wallet, and opened it to show Fran a small, and quite old, photograph tucked into the front. A man of about twenty-eight, and a woman a little younger. The woman had Michael’s eyes, and she looked as if she was trying not to laugh while the photograph was taken. Her dark hair was slightly wind-blown, and she was leaning happily against the man who had his arm around her shoulders.

Fran stared at the photograph, and then looked back at Michael. ‘But that’s—’

Michael said very quietly, ‘It’s a photograph of Alraune. But Alraune wasn’t Lucretia’s daughter, Francesca. Alraune was Lucretia’s son. Alraune was my father.’



‘Arranging for the baby to be baptized as Alraune was Leo Dreyer’s cruellest jibe,’ Alice had said on the night she told Michael about Auschwitz. ‘I hadn’t especially thought about baptism or any kind of christening – I was too caught up with making sure the baby survived and that I survived with it.’

Michael registered that she referred to the child as ‘it’.

‘But a week or so after the birth, one of the camp commandants came into our hut, and took the child away to be baptized. There was some diatribe about Jews with the order, of course – they were still trying to maintain the myth that I was Jewish at that time, and one of the subtler tortures they had devised around then was to force Christian baptism on all new-born Jewish children. To a real Jew that would have been torment, of course. But I had no feelings about it.’

‘So the baby was given Christian baptism.’

‘Yes. And on Leo Dreyer’s instructions – he was Colonel Dreyer by that time – the name given was Alraune.’

There was no need for Michael to suddenly shiver and to glance uneasily over his shoulder to the partly open door, but he could not help it. At once, Alice said, ‘It’s perfectly all right, Michael, you’re completely safe here.’

‘I know. It’s OK. Go on about – about him.’

About Alraune, said his mind. Alraune. Mandragora officinarum. The strange plant called by the Arabs ‘Satan’s Apple’ considered by the ancients to be a soporofic, but also to excite delirium and madness. Anathema to demons, it was said to shriek when uprooted, but was attributed with aphrodisiacal qualities. When he was fourteen Michael had looked up the word alraune in the local library, and although he had not understood all the references, he had understood enough. At fourteen he had certainly understood about aphrodisiacs.

‘I loathed the name, of course,’ said Alice. ‘I knew quite well it was Dreyer’s way of branding the baby – because of the film and because of the stigma attached to the name. Alraune, the evil soulless child born from a bizarre sexual experiment…But when they gave me the birth certificate I just shrugged and looked bored.’

‘Lucretia’s shrug.’

‘Yes, I was always Lucretia inside Auschwitz. There was no reason to think the birth certificate was anything other than a properly registered document, and that was quite important. Officialdom ruled in Germany: if you didn’t have the right papers you couldn’t work or find anywhere to live or travel. So I thought the name would have to stay until I could reach England and have it legally changed. But I called him Alan – I thought it was sufficiently anonymous.’

‘In Pedlar’s Yard he was known to most people as Al.’

‘Al.’ She appeared to consider it. ‘It suggests a completely new persona, doesn’t it? Tougher and more masculine.’

‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘My mother knew who he was, didn’t she? She knew about Auschwitz.’

‘From what you’ve told me about her I think she must have known quite a lot. I used to talk to him about the Vienna years when he was very small – about meeting Conrad – the serving girl and the rich aristocrat. I tried to make it into a fairy-story for him.’

‘My mother knew all that. She told it to me as a fairy-story. But not Auschwitz.’

‘I never talked to Alraune about Auschwitz,’ said Alice. ‘But he lived there until he was almost four, and he would have had memories.’

‘I think my mother knew about Auschwitz, though. But she used to say there were dark places in the world, and that we would only ever make stories about the good places. The places full of light.’

‘When you tell me things like that about her, I regret very much that I didn’t know her,’ said Alice, rather sadly.