The Escape Page 21

I realize I am, in fact, ravenous, as I wolf down consommé soup and a crumbling bread roll. Then the white-aproned waiter brings pork chops in some kind of blackcurrant sauce, with fried potatoes and cabbage. The cruet set in the centre of the table is brushed steel, and so is the vase for the pink plastic rose, the ashtray and the napkin holders. They look like spare parts for armaments, I think: tanks, guns or some other sleek killing machine. Quill orders champagne and I drink it like lemonade. The restaurant begins to tilt and right itself, as if we’re at sea.

  I speak as little as possible, skirting around the danger zone. But a nod or grunt here and there seems to satisfy him. He talks for both of us, just as he has ordered for both of us, lights cigarettes for both of us. I realize I haven’t smoked a single cigarette since I came through to the East. I only seem to need to smoke when I’m near him, I think as I inhale. The nicotine gives me a head rush.

  Afterwards I’m grateful for his supporting arm, guiding me across the restaurant and into the lobby. He collects the key on its oversized plastic fob and asks if I’m ready for bed. I smile, thinking of the blessed numbness of sleep. ‘Yes,’ I say.

  He takes my hand and leads me towards the lift.

  Chapter 31

  January 1945, Liberated Germany

  Detta

  The door banged open and one of the Frenchmen walked out. She smiled at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eye and walked past.

  Detta quickly folded the Russian document and passed it to Tom, who stood behind her in the queue. He gave her a questioning look, but she frowned, shook her head and turned away. It occurred to her that if one of the men from the cellar had tipped off the Russians that there was a German girl with the English prisoners (perhaps in the hope that this information would give him some kind of preferential treatment), the document, with all its Soviet stamps, would be no use at all. Worse – it could serve as evidence of espionage.

  No, she’d have to get through this on her own.

  A woman’s face appeared in the doorway, cold smile cutting her doughy cheeks. She nodded at Detta. The queue shuffled, bunching up behind her as Detta followed the woman through the doorway. Inside the room the air was a fraction warmer than the rest of the factory, although there was still the same gritty feeling of cement dust up her nostrils and on her tongue as elsewhere.

  The woman motioned for her to sit on the metal-framed chair in front of the wide wooden desk. Behind the desk were two leather armchairs. The grinning woman sat down in the one on the left. In the other, a Russian officer, with an aristocratic nose and white hair, sat with legs crossed, heronlike, smoking a cigarette in a long, ivory holder. He looked at Detta through the haze of blue smoke but said nothing. Between the seated Russians, in front of a huge plate-glass window, stood a middle-aged man in a crumpled German Wehrmacht uniform. He wrung his hands and gulped as if he had a fishbone stuck in his throat.

  She sat on the hard chair and placed her hands in her lap. She curled her fingers, balling her fists – if she fiddled, she’d look as nervous as the German soldier. Weak daylight filtered through the window onto her face. The Russians and the German were in shadow. The Russian man cleared his throat.

  ‘Je suis française,’ she said, before he could speak. It had become almost reflexive now. I’m French: if she said it enough times she would start to believe it herself, she supposed. ‘Je m’appelle Odette Bruncelle,’ she said, and waited. The man and the woman exchanged glances. The German prisoner then asked her if she spoke any German at all, as he did not speak French. She told him that she did, and he translated to the Russians, who exchanged a few words. The woman maintained her inane grin, whilst the officer’s face was set like concrete.

  Eventually the officer began to interrogate her through the prisoner, while the woman scribbled notes in a file. Every question was posed in Russian and translated into German.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Alsace-Lorraine in France.’

  ‘What are you doing in Germany?’

  ‘I’m a forced worker.’

  ‘Why are you a forced worker?’

  ‘Because the authorities told me to report to the Labour office and they sent me to Germany. I had no say in the matter.’

  ‘Which authorities?’

  ‘The Nazi occupation ones, of course.’

  ‘When were you sent here?’

  ‘In October 1943.’

  ‘Where were you working in Germany?’

  ‘In a factory in Gorlitz in Silesia.’

  ‘What were you making?’

  ‘I don’t know, we made metal parts, but none of us knew what they were for; the Germans didn’t tell us anything.’

  There was a break, then, while the Russians conferred. The soldier gave her a hasty, guilty apology, saying he was sorry, but he was only the interpreter. She nodded, looking up past his bobbing head and through the office window. The old cement factory, which the Russians were using as a refugee processing centre, was on the outskirts of Oppeln. Through the first-floor vantage point she could see across the railway tracks and into the town – what was left of it: a jumble of crumbled masonry. She could even make out the remnants of the Reichsbahn building, looking as if it had been given a cuff to the side of the head by a giant hand. The fire escape had lifted from the walls of the upper storey and hung free as unpicked stitches.

  The questions started again:

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘25th September 1925.’

  ‘What’s your home address?’

  ‘17, Rue des Jardins, Colmar.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Why do you speak such good German?’

  ‘Everyone in Alsace speaks German as well as French. As I’m sure you know, Alsace has been both German and French over the years, so the people speak both languages, just as the border peoples do in Russia, like the Ukrainians.’

  The man tipped the ash from his cigarette into the metal ashtray on the desk, and leant across to make a comment to the woman. She nodded, and made a note on her papers.

  ‘Why is it that you came here with some English prisoners?’

  ‘When I heard that our glorious Russian allies were not far away, I decided to go on the run in the hope of being freed. I walked east at night and hid during the day. When I reached Lossen I heard French voices and managed to hide with them in their barracks. There were Englishmen there, too, but I don’t know them. Your soldiers liberated us and brought us all here.’

  Detta waited for the German man to translate this into Russian. He gesticulated as he spoke, as if unwinding an invisible spool of thread. When he finished there was silence for a moment. The woman, still grinning, tilted her head at the officer. He stubbed the remains of his cigarette in the ashtray and shrugged.

  Outside, she leant on the corridor wall, shut her eyes and exhaled. Tom was in after her – she didn’t dare make eye contact. When she heard the door slam shut, she opened her eyes again. It was only then she noticed that her hands were still balled into fists, slick with sweat. Gordon was staring at her from the head of the queue. ‘Okay?’ he mouthed. She nodded, released her fingers and wiped the clammy dampness on her coat. But when she looked down she realized that what she’d thought was sweat, was thick-red blood. She’d dug her nails so deep into her palms during the interrogation that she’d made herself bleed. She rubbed her hands together, so the vestiges of blood became sticky. ‘Pas de problème,’ she said, catching Gordon’s eye. ‘Parceque je suis française.’

  Tom

  ‘Don’t look,’ he said, but it was already too late. She’d seen the baby’s arm, rising out of the snowdrift, a silvery glint as the sunlight caught the frosted flesh. It was only then that he realized that all the lumps in the snow they’d been trudging wearily past, these last few days, weren’t drifts, but bodies. Had she known it all along? He couldn’t tell. She hadn’t spok
en to him since the processing centre. They trudged along at the back of the line. The fields were flat and featureless white. A few snowflakes drifted, seemingly from nowhere, as the sky was endless blue – their world an empty snowglobe.

  They’d left Oppeln, escorted by an old Soviet guard, gap-toothed and grumpy, gesticulating with his rifle to their billets in devastated villages en route. They were headed to Krakow, where they’d been told they could catch a train to Port Odessa in Romania, but there was no transport in Poland, just shanks pony. The villagers, what was left of them, the very old and the very young mostly, shared what they could: potato soup, herb tea, the occasional hand-rolled cigarette. They had almost nothing; devastated by the Red Army as they swarmed through. But it was easier than the forced march from the POW camp. Gordon could walk unaided now – he was up ahead with the French, having swapped his RAF cap for Jean-Paul’s beret – and there wasn’t the constant fear of jittery German trigger fingers.

  Detta turned her head away as he spoke, even though they’d both seen that little frozen arm, etched in silver in the morning sunshine. Her hair flipped as her head spun away from the image that couldn’t be unseen, and that’s when he noticed.

  ‘Where’s your scarf?’

  ‘I left it with the woman in last night’s billet.’ She answered him; it was more than she’d spoken in days.

  Last night’s billet: six of them sat round a kitchen table, heads on their arms, dozing through the freezing night. Breakfast had been half a wrinkled apple and a cup of black tea, scrutinized by the stares of a handful of snot-nosed children. He didn’t remember the woman very well. She was old, had kept herself huddled in the corners of the room.

  ‘The grandmother?’ he said.

  ‘She wasn’t their grandmother. She was their mother. She rubbed charcoal on her face to make her look older because of what the Russians did.’ Detta paused then, pulled in a breath before continuing. ‘Many times, they did it. In front of her children, too. She lost her husband to the war. She’s terrified that the Russians might have given her syphilis, or some other disease, and there’ll be nobody to care for her children. She told me this morning, while I was helping with the dishes. I just thought, it’s good quality, that scarf – mohair and angora – she might be able to barter it for food.’ Detta paused, and turned to look at him. ‘Hearing her story just made me realize,’ she continued, ‘how deplorable my own self-pity has been.’

  ‘Not at all.’ He reached out to touch her. For didn’t she have every right to despair: a mother dead, a home destroyed, identity bartered for freedom.

  ‘But I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got you, haven’t I?’ she said, looking deep into his eyes.

  ‘Always,’ he pulled her towards him. ‘You will always have me. I promise.’

  Chapter 32

  November 1989, Frankfurt an der Oder, East Germany

  Miranda

  I stand next to the window in the dingy hotel room. With one hand I touch the subsiding bruise on my temple. There is not much left to show for Quill’s outburst of violence in Berlin. ‘I love you so much,’ he says, reaching out to me. But when I open my mouth to respond, nothing comes out. ‘I feel so empty when you’re not there,’ he says, filling my silence.

  Outside the rain falls, making glistening halos round the streetlights. I watch the top of an umbrella float like a black lily down the sluice of pavement below, and hear the muffled sound of the evening traffic, like a river running off the edge.

  ‘You mean the world to me. You know how good we are together. Don’t let that go, Miranda. We’re special, you and me. The journalism, that’s what’s really important, you know that, don’t you? The other stuff, the stuff you heard me talking about on the phone – it’s just business, an income stream. It doesn’t mean anything. It just lets me focus on what’s really important, without having to worry about money. We can have a good life and still do the things we’re passionate about, Miranda. With the money I make I can set you up with your own studio, buy you all the equipment you need, and it frees me up to write about the things I really care about. My business interests needn’t change anything between us.’

  I run my other hand along the windowsill. Dusty – my fingers are caked with the sloughed-off skin cells of the others who’d been in this yellow-wallpapered hotel room. Who? Businessmen? Stasi operatives? Mistresses, informers, prostitutes?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry about what I did. I was angry, but I promise you – I promise you – that nothing like that will ever happen again. Think about how happy we make each other, how good we are together, Miranda. Our love makes unhappiness seem to have lost our address. Miranda?’

  I struggle to comprehend his higgledy-piggledy words. Perhaps the last couple of days of only hearing and speaking German have switched off my facility for understanding English. Or perhaps what he says makes no sense.

  I see his hand appear next to mine on the sill. He lays down two passports, their dark blue covers the same colour as the encroaching night outside. I reach out and take them. The one on top is his. I open it. Quill DeVere: dark brows, strong jaw, flash of teeth, in the black-and-white rectangle. The other one is mine. Miranda Wade: cropped silver hair, owlish eyes with long lashes. I find my voice at last: ‘You told me you burnt it,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but of course I didn’t. I just hid it. What do you take me for? I’m not some kind of monster. And I needed it for the Stasi, to prove you were who you said.’

  ‘I smelled burning. I saw ash in the sink.’

  ‘I burnt the toast, that was all. I was amazed you fell for it to be honest.’

  ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘For your own good, Miranda. For us. To keep you close.’ He is standing behind me. If I turn, I will have to face him. I feel him take something else from his jeans. He places it on the windowsill in front of me, next to the passports. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘We did it.’ It is a piece of newsprint: the front page of the Sunday Correspondent. There is my photo, the one I took of the border guard breaking down at the sight of the lifted barrier. My name is written in tiny type at the side of the shot. My name: Miranda Wade – not Reuters, or Associated Press, but my own name. On the front page of a national paper. My photograph has captured the moment when the world woke up to history. ‘Freedom?’ says the headline in bold black type.

  ‘My piece is on page three,’ he says. ‘They led with your picture. And quite right, too. It’s amazing. You’re such a talented girl. And together, we’re a formidable team, you and me.’ I feel his breath on my neck. ‘You mustn’t leave me again,’ he whispers, his lips against my flesh. I feel something tug and give inside. A sudden exhalation escapes my lips, as if I’ve been holding my breath.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but now seems like the right time,’ he says, and turns me round, so I can no longer look at the photo. He tugs at the gold signet ring on the baby finger of his left hand and holds it out to me. ‘I want you to have it.’ He puts it in my palm.

  I pick it up and hold it between finger and thumb. There is some kind of heraldic bird etched deeply into the gold oval: beak open, screaming. Quill urges me to try it on, but it doesn’t quite fit any of the fingers on my right hand – either too big or too small for all of them.

  ‘Try the other hand,’ he says. I do, and it fits the ring finger on my left hand. ‘Leave it there. It looks good, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. But on this finger it makes me look like I’m engaged?’ I cannot stop my voice rising to a question mark at the end of the sentence.

  ‘It does look that way, doesn’t it?’ he says. One of his hands snakes up underneath my jumper. The other hand reaches in front, catches my jaw, and I find I have no choice but to look into his eyes. They are very dark, in the light of the dim hotel bulbs. He ducks his head slightly and a lock of black hair twitches above his brow. ‘I’ll always be here for you. I promise. Don’t you love me, Miranda?’ His lips stay parted as he leaves
the question hanging, and I glimpse his white teeth, his wet tongue.

  I glance beyond him. Above the double bed is a huge black and white photograph of Marlene Dietrich, looking down on us with a mocking smile. I have that reassuring feeling of wanting to escape. ‘Yes,’ I say, letting myself sway into him.

  Then his lips find mine, his hands tug my clothes, and we stumble backwards, together, falling onto the musty-smelling bedsheets, limbs tangling, hands grabbing. His skin is warm against mine and he smells of almonds and smoke and I am wet-tight ready for him as he pins my arms down and plunges into me. ‘Yes,’ I say, feeling the exquisite push of him. ‘Yes. Yes.’ And the strange little room shears and falls away. The rush of it: colours flash, a buzzing in my head, then blackness. I hear my scream as if it is someone else – disembodied, apart.

  And when I open my eyes he is on top of me, sweat glueing our bodies together. He is so heavy. I struggle to breathe with the weight of him on my chest. La petite mort – that’s what the French call it: the little death.

  Chapter 33

  March 1945, Romania

  Tom

  ‘It’s not always the best policy.’ Tom felt a hand on his back.

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘Honesty, old man. Not always the best policy.’ Major Croft held a clipboard in one hand. A piece of string attached a pen to the bulldog clip at the top of the clipboard. The paperwork fluttered and flipped in the wind. He had been going down the line, ticking off all the allied prisoners and forced workers on his list: the line of ticks looked like the seagulls that whirled on the thermals above the docks. But there was one missing. Where a gull should be, there was instead a worm – a question mark next to Detta’s name.

  ‘But I told you, and so did Flight Sergeant Harper, she saved our lives. You have that in writing in our repatriation statements, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but—’

  ‘But she’s German?’

  ‘It does put me in rather an awkward position with London.’