perhaps, she thought suddenly, the words contained a message for her. For when she looked back over her long life, it seemed that everything she could remember, the century’s swirling tides that she had been forced to sail upon, had now no more substance than a dream. And this city – in which so much of it had come to pass, in which more than eighty years had slipped like fine sand through her fingers – was not its history, especially its most recent past, as unreal as the events of a fairytale? And for each character, in every fairytale she had ever read, whether the ending was happy or sad, there was always a final page and one last, conclusive full stop.
There was a knock at the door. Too abrupt, too authoritative by far, for children.
‘Mother.’
But, of course, it was only Hannah.
‘Yes?’ How faint her own voice sounded.
Her daughter knocked again. ‘Mother, are you awake yet?’
Frau Maier raised her head from the pillow and cleared her throat. She must be still half-asleep.
‘I’m just about to get up.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’
The door opened and Hannah came into the room. She was wearing an apron over the new dress the old lady knew she had bought especially for today. She was smiling, though her face looked strained. She bent down beside the bed and kissed her mother on the forehead.
‘Happy birthday, Mother. I wish you all the health and happiness you could desire for another year.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
Frau Maier reached out and hugged her daughter. ‘Are the children being difficult downstairs?’
‘You should know what it’s like. There’s so much to do and the little ones always seem to be under your feet. Lukas and Maria have baked you some currant bread. It tastes delicious. They insisted on using the old bread oven though, which meant having to light a fire. Miroslav had to chop up that old chair in the cellar for wood. You don’t mind, do you?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I doubt if it was much good for anything else.’ She hoped it wasn’t the one she thought it was, but then was there any longer a point in hoarding these things from her past? The house was full of everything it had been possible to save from two world wars and their aftermaths. Each small ornament, photograph, or piece of furniture meant something to her, but perhaps the time had come to stop clinging on to all this debris. Maybe the oven, that had remained so long unlit, was the best place for many other things that seemed, on this morning of her ninetieth birthday, to have suddenly lost their meaning.
Hannah went back downstairs, closing the door behind her, and Frau Maier began to get up. She poured some water into the china bowl on the stand beside her bed and washed. The modern bathroom, that had been fitted at Hannah’s insistence when she moved back to live with her mother after her husband’s death, held no attractions for her. She washed, and lived, as she had always done. She took out a simple, dark-coloured dress, that she seemed to remember wearing for her eightieth birthday, and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror. Did she look any different from the last time she had worn it? The material seemed to hang more loosely from the shoulders, perhaps, her hair looked a little thinner, but other than that the only real difference she thought she could detect was a certain transparency of the skin, as if it might be possible soon to see the pale bones, like underwater coral, that had lain concealed for all these years beneath the surface.
She fastened a single strand of pearls around her neck and continued to stare at the reflection. A shadow crossed the glass and she realized that someone else had entered the room and was now standing behind her. He was dressed in uniform and his fair hair had been combed so meticulously it might have been parted with a razor.
‘You look so young tonight,’ he said, beginning to stroke the dark waves of hair that fell to her shoulders. She watched him in the mirror as he gently twisted her hair around one hand.
‘How long have we known each other?’ he asked suddenly.
She smiled, recalling that afternoon in the café on the Ku’damm when she had spilt coffee over him; the incident had lost her the job as a waitress, but gained her a husband.
‘Almost four years,’ she said.
‘And yet you’re still a mystery to me.’ He pulled her hair a little harder so that she was forced to bend her neck back towards him. ‘Look at your face, Greta,’ he said. ‘You’re not a peasant girl from the Tannenberg forest at all, are you? Your ancestors weren’t Prussian!’
Greta looked into his eyes, unsure as to whether he was being serious or simply teasing her. Still holding her hair, he pulled her head back against his chest, whilst his free hand began to caress her throat.
‘Your hair’s too dark, my love; your cheekbones too high. Some of my friends have commented on it.’
Suddenly growing frightened, she tried to break away from him, but he held her too tightly. He contained her struggles and bent his head so that he could kiss her neck. She felt his lips brush the skin below her ear. He was pressing her whole body back against him and she relaxed, as he released her hair. She tried to turn her head so that she could kiss him, but he wouldn’t let her. He held his mouth away from hers and moved his hands so that they rested over her small breasts. He squeezed her, forcing her body back against him so that she could feel the hardness of his uniform’s buttons through the thin material of her dress.
‘You scared me,’ she said very softly.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he answered, still kissing her neck. ‘It was just that when I came into the room and saw you there, you looked almost like someone I didn’t know. Perhaps as your mother might once have looked.’ He paused. ‘I’m so sorry I never met her.’
She nodded dumbly, recalling the terrible months after they had first arrived in the city more than fifteen years before, when her mother, like so many others, had died from influenza.
‘And your father? I have just begun to realize how strange it is to have married a girl whose parents one knows nothing about.’ He paused and she felt his eyes piercing into her. ‘I bet they were gypsies! That’s why you’ve always been so secretive about them.’
‘They weren’t gypsies!’ Greta cried indignantly. ‘How can you say such things! My father was a Prussian farmer, who was killed in the war fighting the Russians. I was six years old and I saw him die. That’s no secret! You’ve known that from the very beginning. You’ve seen a photograph of him.’
‘Of course. How stupid of me to forget. I remember thinking now how much he reminded me of your brother.’
‘And Hans looks every bit a Prussian.’
She saw her husband nod slowly. ‘He does indeed,’ he said. ‘But then you look nothing like him. You take after your mother – whose photograph I’ve never ever seen.’
‘That’s because I don’t have one,’ Greta answered quietly. ‘You know what it was like then. Most of what we had was left behind in the East. Almost all the family records were lost.’ She tried to turn round to face him, but found he was still holding her too tightly. ‘You know the problems you had getting a marriage licence because I had no documents and they could find no records in the East.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I remember.’
She hesitated nervously. ‘Why are you asking me these things, Wolfgang?’
‘Curiosity. Only curiosity.’ He smiled suddenly and she saw his hands travel down across her body and begin to lift the hem of her dress. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’
She stared, horrified, at their reflection, as though she were watching him with another woman. He pushed the fabric up around her waist and then began to caress her bare thighs. Closing her eyes, she leaned limply back against him, and then shivered as she felt his hands slide beneath the waistband