The Aftermath Read online

  ‘What? And pretend we’re all jolly friends? All on the same side?’

  ‘We are. On the same side,’ Lewis said.

  Rachael stood and crossed the floor to that narrow bed, pinching her nightdress away from her breasts. She plumped the pillows up so that she might sit upright. Her book – Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie – was already on the bedside table: her escape route if he persisted.

  Perhaps sensing the chance slipping away, he asked: ‘Are we going to … have a moment?’

  ‘Do we have to? Now?’

  ‘We don’t have to.’

  ‘I mean, it feels a bit strange. With them up there. It’s been a long three days.’

  ‘It’s fine. You’re tired. It’s fine.’

  Maybe if he had just taken her without saying, surprised her, she might have gone with it; it might have been how it used to be.

  She reached for her book.

  ‘Have you really been crying every day?’

  Rachael tensed. He wanted to talk.

  ‘Ed’s a whatnot for saying that.’

  ‘But … have you?’

  ‘Mayfield says my nerves are still fragile.’

  ‘What about Pring? Have you had some chats?’

  ‘I’ve stopped going to church.’

  It felt good – oddly satisfying – to admit this. But she didn’t explain herself. For Lewis, who had little angst (the curious new word Mayfield had used), it was a practical question. What he really meant was: have you spent time with people or have you been isolated? He certainly wouldn’t infer from her answer that there was no God because He’d let a stray bomb land at precisely the right spot at the exact moment Michael had come down the stairs in answer to her call.

  Rachael could feel a pressure at the sluice gates. She’d held it back for several days, but it was coming.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she said. ‘You weren’t there. You don’t seem to feel it the way I do.’

  ‘I’ve not had much time for feelings,’ Lewis said. Honest but inadequate.

  ‘But why don’t you feel it?’ She saved him from trying to articulate it. ‘It’s all right. You have your work. You have a country to rebuild …’ And, with this, the dammed waters began to burst. ‘… The country that killed my … beautiful boy!’

  This sobbing that came when she remembered Michael was similar to the way she might have cried when she was a girl; it shook her whole diaphragm and forced her to catch her breath in shudders. Lewis put a hand on her back and stroked her, but he could not enter her chamber of pain.

  ‘And now you make me live here with these people.’

  ‘Everyone here – everyone in this house – has experienced loss.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t care if everyone in the world has lost a son. The pain would be the same. I didn’t agree to this …’

  ‘None of us agreed to this. But we must make the best of things …’

  ‘The best of things. Always the best of things! You seem more concerned with the needs of our enemy.’

  ‘Rach. Please. They’re not our enemy any more. They’ve been utterly crushed. Everything must be rebuilt.’

  Rachael tapped her breastbone and paused to catch a breath between sobs.

  ‘Can you rebuild this?’ she asked him, half wanting him to rise to that challenge while at the same time wishing he would just walk away and leave her to the comfort of her brokenness.

  4

  Frieda finished her morning exercises with the medicine ball and started to get dressed for school. She had no uniform (there had been little school since The Catastrophe) and chose to put on her Mädel parade skirt, white blouse and her gymnasium pumps – a minor provocation to the authorities and a red rag to her father, who had told her to put away the clothes of the old regime. Since their humiliating retreat to the top rooms of the house, she had become even more inclined to defy him. He encouraged her to make her new room a little more homely, saying it all looked ‘a little spartan’, suggesting she hang some pictures and bring up the rocking horse from her old bedroom, but she liked it this way. She fancied herself as a Spartan child, cast out from her family’s comforts into the rubble of a ruined land where she must learn to survive. The only decoration she’d permitted herself was a framed sampler her mother had made; it depicted three figures – a man holding an architect’s folding ruler, a woman with a bouquet of flowers and a girl holding the woman’s hand – standing in front of a house by a river with a red sailboat on the horizon. Her mother had given it to her for her eleventh birthday. It had been July 1942, the day the British had started to bomb Hamburg, and one year before the firestorm.

  At least the move upstairs had given her the opportunity to shed the old toys and those English books her father had insisted on reading to her during the raids – Alice in Wonderland, The Happy Prince, Robinson Crusoe – when he was trying to take her mind off the droning of bombers and the kakakak of the Heimwehr guns firing back. ‘Imagination will be our defence,’ he liked to say. But the stories couldn’t bring her mother back.

  Frieda set the medicine ball in the middle of the exercise hoop and squatted over the chamber pot. When she had finished, she lifted the chamber pot and carried it out on to the landing. She walked downstairs to her old bedroom in the ‘British zone’, where she found her intended target playing with her doll’s house. She watched through the open door as Edmund enacted a scene between a male and female doll in the attic of the house and, although she didn’t fully understand the dialogue, it was obvious from the way he’d positioned the dolls who they represented.

  ‘The little boy plays with dollies,’ Frieda said in English, and laughed at him.

  Edmund looked up to see Frieda standing in the doorway with the chamber pot, and wondered if she wanted to initiate some kind of cultural exchange.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, then tried his just-learned greeting: ‘Guten Tag, Fräulein Lubert.’

  Frieda held up the chamber pot as if to say ‘For you’ and placed it on the floor in the middle of the room. She then smiled an odd smile and backed away, closing the door behind her, leaving her hot, golden gift at the feet of this Happy Prince.

  On the way to school, Frieda passed several Trümmerfrauen in heavy smocks and headscarves heading into the city, where they would work through mountains of debris and pile masonry and brickwork into salvageable heaps for a bowl of soup, a loaf of bread and some food vouchers, if they were lucky. Many of them were carrying shovels, and one or two joked, happy to have the work. Frieda would rather be with them. She’d not been to school regularly since the summer of 1943, when the British bombers had destroyed nearly every school in the city. But now, the British had reopened the old town hall and divided one vast room – using plywood walls – into ‘classrooms’. Because the district was overflowing with refugees, there were too many children for the space, which meant many had to squat on the cold floor. Despite these difficulties and a lack of basic supplies – pens, paper and textbooks – the British had made the education of German children a high priority. They were obsessed with it. Having de-loused their heads, they set about rearranging their minds: teaching them that the Führer (whom they disrespectfully called by his first name) and National Socialism were evils that needed to be completely eradicated from the face of the earth. They talked about democracy, asked questions to establish what the children did and didn’t know, and were astonished by their ignorance. Although the teacher, Mr Groves, called everyone by their Christian name and tried to be friendly, preferring to sit in the middle of the class rather than stand at the front, Frieda found the lessons humiliating. She had decided not to res
pond to any of the questions asked, even when she knew the answer.

  As she approached the town hall, Frieda saw that the gates were locked and that several children were gathered beneath a notice that had been posted on the brick wall. The notice, in German, said ‘School closed by order of CCG.’ Some Tommy military police stood around, and three army trucks with canvas covers were parked up along the line of the railings. A captain addressed the children in German:

  ‘Those of you who are under thirteen are free to return home; those over thirteen who are strong enough can assist with the rubble clearance. You will be paid in food vouchers for your work, given a meal, and then be brought back to this point before dark.’

  A cheer went up, and every child that was of that age – and many who clearly weren’t – started to move towards the ruin-bound trucks. The prospect of a meal today and maybe tomorrow was too much to resist. Although Frieda had eaten a relatively hearty breakfast and would be fed again upon her return, she’d rather be out than at home; she followed the hungry herd and climbed up into the back of one of the trucks. The boy sitting next to her was about fourteen and a veteran of ‘the rubble run’. As they jerked and bounced along towards the western suburb of Altona, he boasted of his exploits:

  ‘It’s not bad, you know. I found a necklace and traded it for a chicken. And they give you a good meal. On my last shift we got bread and soup with sausage meat.’

  ‘Was it real sausage?’ another boy asked. ‘Usually, it’s dog meat. Or worse.’

  ‘Real sausage!’ the boy said. ‘Bierwurst, Bratwurst, Rindswurst, Jagdwurst, Knipp, Pinkel, Landjäger …’ He named each sausage slowly, reverently and longingly, constructing a whole charcuterie in the air before them, and the already distended eyes of the children popped out in anticipation of this banquet.

  Twenty minutes later, they jumped out from under the covering to find themselves in the ruins of Altona, some of it so flattened that it was possible to see all the way across St Pauli, to the old, miraculously intact warehouses and canals of Kehrwieder and Wandrahm. An army of women formed a human chain, passing debris along the line, and some of them looked displeased at the sight of the children coming to help: ‘Look at these little rats come to steal our rations.’

  Frieda took her place in the chain. The person passing her bricks was a young man, maybe seventeen years old, who seemed somehow above the agitation of everyone around him. He had a languid energy and an easy strength and was well turned out in a blue jacket which had all its buttons. As she passed the debris to him she found herself absently singing the tune of an old Mädel song (‘We will continue to march, even if everything shatters, because today Germany hears us, and tomorrow, the whole world. And because of the Great War, the world lies in ruins, but devil may care, we build it up again!’).

  As she got to the third verse, she felt his warm hand on her wrist.

  ‘Careful, young lady!’ he interrupted, keeping his eyes on the Tommy guards. ‘Some of them might recognize what you are singing.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. And she felt power and liberation in saying this to the handsome young man with buttons.

  He looked at her, assessing her. ‘You’re not too young to be shot, you know. How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ she lied.

  Just a few yards away, two British squaddies shared a joke and smoked, overseeing the work in a cursory manner.

  ‘They’re so stupid,’ she said. ‘The way they act like they own the place.’

  He laughed. ‘We’re the ones doing the work. They’re the ones standing around enjoying themselves. That makes us the stupid ones.’

  Frieda flushed: he’d caught her callow. She resumed the brick-passing and held her tongue. The proximity of the young man was a pleasant thing. She could smell his bacony sweat and admire his sinewy, glabrous forearms. Each time he passed a brick to her she caught a glimpse of a scar or a birthmark on the underside of his arm. It was in the shape of the number 88. When he noticed her looking at it he stopped to pull his sleeve back down.

  ‘Oi! Blondie!’ The sudden yell from one of the squaddies made Frieda jump. ‘Keep it moving! Schnell!’

  The young man buttoned his sleeve and resumed work. After a short while, he caught her eye with a hesitant but enquiring glance.

  ‘My name is Albert,’ he said. ‘What is yours?’

  ‘Frieda.’

  ‘Frieda,’ he repeated.

  She had never liked her name or its diminutive, Freedie, but on his lips her name sounded quite new, quite grand.

  ‘I like that name. A good German name,’ he went on. His admiration enveloped her like a quilt.

  ‘It means … lady,’ Frieda said.

  And, with that, he took her hand and shook it politely.

  ‘And so you are,’ he said. ‘A proper German lady.’

  A call went up further along the line – ‘Body!’ – and everyone stopped and looked towards the woman who’d shouted out and was now standing back from what she’d discovered. Other women joined her and started to pull back more bricks, to reveal a skeletal arm protruding from the ruins, hand cocked to one side in an angle of supplication. The women started to pull the bricks away with more urgency, as though in a race against time to save a potential survivor; and a few seconds later they’d managed to expose the rest of the skeleton, and then another, lying on top of it between the legs of the smaller body in a position of coition. The intimate archaeological find had a silencing effect on the staring women.

  Frieda broke from her line and went to look more closely. She stared at the dead lovers in their final clutch, feeling a peculiar pull, rather than the revulsion the others showed.

  ‘All right, everyone. Step back. Come on. It’s not a bloody cinema!’

  Two Tommies came over and shepherded the gawpers away then went to look for themselves. One of them stood astride the little hollow that served as the couple’s tomb and looked down.

  ‘Not a bad way to go,’ he said to his mate. ‘One final fuck before lights out.’

  ‘They look like they’re still enjoying themselves,’ his mate replied, and they laughed, before realizing there was still an audience looking down at them. ‘Come on, you lot. Back to work!’

  Frieda couldn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the gold wedding bands on the fingers of the dead couple. At least they had died together, at the same time. Not like her parents. The Tommy with his legs still astride the hole had seen the rings, too. He bent down and removed them, breaking off one of the fingers in his haste; he then held the rings up to check the carats before handing one of them to his colleague. ‘Can’t take them with you,’ he said, before pocketing the ring. ‘Bag these bones!’ he shouted at the women, in German.

  Frieda returned to her place in the chain next to Albert, her eyes glazed with tears. The tears sprang less from a compassion for the dead couple and more from a brimming contempt for the people who had brought about their end; and for the loss of her own mother, whose body had never been found.

  ‘I must have more light in here. I’d like you to move these. Heike? The plants?’

  Rachael semaphored to the offending greenery which filled one of the bay windows and, to her eyes, blocked the light she so craved after months of low-ceilinged, indoor dinginess endured back home. Except for conservatories, and the ubiquitous aspidistra, Rachael had never seen so many plants in the main part of a house before. Perhaps, in Germany, it was the height of good taste to fill a room with shrubs, but she couldn’t live with them.

  Heike went to the first offending plant, a waxy – almost plastic – green yucca, and bent to lift it. Just before she did, she hesitated
and looked at Rachael, pointing a wavering finger towards the door, making doubly sure this was what the mistress wanted.

  ‘Yes. Put them in another room. Thank you.’ Rachael compensated for her lack of German by overenunciating, and inadvertently accented the word ‘you’, and that seemed to make the maid smile. As Heike carried the plant from the room, she giggled then blushed at her own laughter. It was probably nerves more than subversion, but Rachael was irritated by her amusement, as though her request were proof of some foreign peculiarity.

  Rachael was making her first territorial statements in her new home, delivering them with a curt clarity of which Prime Minister Attlee would surely have approved. And if a lack of language and an inexperience with staff made her sound sharper than she intended, it was important she assert herself from the start and define the boundaries by which they might live life under the same roof. But no amount of British military-issue crockery and glassware or rearranging of furniture could change the fact that she was living in someone else’s property, sleeping in someone else’s bed, moving through someone else’s space. If anything, the alterations she instigated – the removal of the plants, the nude sculpture in the hall made modest with a drape, the dining-room chairs swapped with the more comfortable kitchen wickers – served only to entrench the house’s character further. As she walked through its rooms, Rachael fancied she could hear its mocking condescension whispering from the walls: You don’t belong here and you never will.

  This self-assured quality seemed to seep into the staff, who, for all their outward deference, the mechanical bowing and nodding, regarded her – she was sure of this – as an imposter. She was both ingénue and parvenue – especially to the weary, closed-mouthed Greta, who had served the Lubert family longest and whose loyalties stretched furthest back. The withering, disappointed looks she gave Rachael were like those of a royal servant who’d seen several queens come and go, all of whom had failed to live up to the first. The place, Rachael felt, was still under the aegis, the spell, of its former mistress, whose presence manifested itself most powerfully in the looks and bearing of the staff, whose hesitations and uncertain responses to instruction barely disguised their real attitude: Our lady would never have done it that way.