Chapter Eleven
Berlin
Doris
The Tiergarten encounter was still on Doris’ mind days later when she woke, again, to the sound of Hannah’s bow scraping.
And through that day while shopping in the Kaisergalerie and later when she went to pay a call on the daughter of a prominent newspaper editor, a girl her own age who wanted to improve her English, and who talked, Doris thought, about nothing except tennis.
Even as she politely corrected Ilse – ‘I think, not I am thinking’ – she considered what it was she did in Berlin, and how useful it might still be.
She had no way of knowing, she realised.
She had heard nothing since the encounter, but that wasn’t unusual.
She knew to wait. To go about her life until such time as they told her more.
Or indeed, didn’t tell her more. Sometimes, the approaches led to nothing.
A half-idea begun and then abandoned without consulting her.
That was the way of it. She decided nothing, only played her small part in what others decided.
She thought so much about it that she entirely forgot her promise to teach Hannah, and it was several days before she remembered. Or rather, before Hannah reminded her when they again met in the lift. ‘You said you’d show me a trick,’ she said bluntly. ‘For holding the bow.’
‘Hannah!’ her mother said.
‘No, she’s perfectly correct,’ Doris reassured her. ‘I did say that, and then I forgot. But I will, as soon as ever you’ll let me.’
‘Now?’ Hannah said.
‘Come for tea, tomorrow afternoon?’ Beatrice said with a smile.
The next afternoon, Beatrice greeted her at the door. ‘Hannah is brushing her hair,’ she said. ‘She wants to make a good impression.’
‘Of course,’ Doris said.
‘Whatever is to be done, Hannah will try to do it as best she can,’ Beatrice said, rolling her eyes a little. ‘She is so very serious in everything.’
‘Your only daughter?’ Doris asked.
‘Yes, an only child. She’s probably too much with my husband and me. It makes her older than her years.’
‘Your husband is at work?’
‘Yes.’ Beatrice hesitated a moment. ‘He is out.’
It was, Doris thought, a correction rather than an addition.
She shook her head slightly. She really must try to stop parsing every word that was said to her, cutting and slicing sentences this way and that to see if there were more meanings, other meanings, than what they seemed.
Hannah arrived, in a white frock that was too tight, hair loose around her shoulders.
The apartment was smaller than hers and had no views onto Leipziger Strasse, but only onto the rather narrow street that ran off it. But it was pleasantly furnished with a great many books and paintings, mostly views of Berlin streets, corners of the city’s many parks.
‘You paint?’ she asked.
‘My husband,’ Beatrice said. ‘In his spare time.’
‘Papa is an artist,’ Hannah said proudly.
‘He’s not,’ Beatrice said with a laugh. ‘He’s a clerk. But he does like to paint.’
‘Only streets and parks, never people?’
‘He says Berlin is his inspiration, that he wants to capture the changing light and shade and atmosphere of the city.’
They talked about art then, about Hannah’s school – ‘I am on summer holidays now,’ she clarified – and then Beatrice asked what Doris knew she would eventually: ‘Where are you from?’ Her German was good enough that she passed as native in brief conversations.
But anything more and she could feel the question building.
‘England,’ she said. ‘But my mother is German. I moved here a year ago, a little more.’
‘England,’ Beatrice repeated.
‘We remember when you arrived,’ Hannah said.
‘You do?’
‘We knew you were one person,’ Hannah said, ‘because the hausmeister told us, and we thought we’d never seen so many dress boxes and trunks for just one person before.’
Doris laughed.
‘And because you played such wonderful music on your gramophone,’ Hannah said wistfully. ‘American, I think?’
‘Sshhh.’ Beatrice nudged Hannah sharply, making an alarmed O with her mouth.
‘But you don’t play it anymore?’ the girl continued. ‘Only classical?’
‘I prefer that now,’ Doris said evasively.
She had quickly understood that her records – Cole Porter, Duke Ellington – were a bad idea, viewed with suspicion, even disgust, by the people she needed to get to know.
And so she had thrown them away, wrapping them in many layers of newspaper before putting them in the bin, in case the hausmeister, whom she mistrusted, dig through and see them.
She had replaced the emptiness with Bach, Wagner, Handel.
‘Let me show you the trick I learned with the bow.’ She and Hannah went to the girl’s bedroom and Doris tried to teach her what she remembered.
‘You must hold with the very ends of your fingers, and play as if your arm is on a string suspended from the ceiling. The string takes all the weight, so there is no weight in your hand.’
‘Yes, I think I see …’ Hannah said, grasping the bow firmly.
She didn’t see. Doris, squashing a laugh, understood immediately that there was no way the girl would be able to learn what she taught, but so solemn was Hannah in her efforts, so honest in her determination, that Doris sat with her anyway and called encouragement.
‘Yes, jolly good, I think you are really getting it now …’
When she went back to the drawing room, Beatrice was turning a stocking. She smiled at Doris. ‘How kind you are. I don’t think she will ever trouble the people of the Philharmonie, but she wants so badly to learn.’ Then, ‘May I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’ Doris wondered would she ask her to come regularly, to give Hannah lessons. If she did, she would say yes, Doris decided. She hadn’t realised how much she missed the company of her own little sisters and brother. To spend her afternoons with Hannah would be a pleasure.
‘How do we get to England?’ Beatrice asked bluntly.
Doris felt her eyes open wide.
‘I’m sorry,’ Beatrice said. ‘I know that’s abrupt. Probably uncomfortable for you. But we don’t have time … We have been trying to get to England, and we have found no way, except to try and send Hannah on her own and we don’t want to do that.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ Doris said automatically, trying to catch up.
‘Is there any way that you know of that we can go? I thought maybe, because you are English, you might know things that we do not?’
‘I don’t …’ Doris stalled. Then, ‘Forgive me … you are Jewish?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t realise.’
‘It’s not a thing one wants anyone to realise these days,’ Beatrice said bitterly.
‘It’s why we want to leave. Hannah doesn’t know yet, but after the summer she won’t be going back to her school.
They don’t want her. There is another school she can go to but it is further away …
But it isn’t that. Not just that. My husband has lost his job.
He is out, with his paints, but he no longer works.
We want to get away, but there is nowhere for us to go.
No country we can reach that will take us. ’
‘You have family?’
‘In Poland, where my husband is from. But we cannot go there. Better even to stay here than that. Please. I know this is unexpected, even rude,’ she shook her head, ‘but the chance of meeting you, of your being English, I couldn’t not.’
‘I will think,’ Doris said. ‘I will see if there is anything …’
‘Maybe you know someone,’ Beatrice persisted, so that Doris understood just how far need outstripped manners in this diffident woman. ‘Someone who can help us?’
‘I will see,’ Doris said again.
‘Thank you.’
Hannah came back then. ‘I really think I have the hang of it now,’ she said.
‘Will you hear me?’ She played the Dvo?ák piece again, from start to finish, brows creased in concentration above the chin rest. It was no better, Doris thought, not at all, but Hannah was delighted.
‘I cannot wait to play for Herr Meinder,’ she said, ‘when my lessons start again.’ She went back to her room to put the violin away.
‘Her lessons won’t start again,’ Beatrice said bitterly.
‘Herr Meinder no longer teaches her. He no longer finds that it is possible.’ She made a tight, twisting movement with her hands, as though scraping something from them, then picked up her darning again.
‘So many things, it seems, are no longer possible …’
Back in her own apartment that evening, Doris put a record on the gramophone as she dressed to go out, and began to list to herself the people who might help.
There were many, she thought joyfully, trying on a dress of cream lace.
And yet, as she listed the names to herself, with every one there came to her reasons why she could not ask them.
Until she realised that it was only one reason; each time, the same reason.
And that she was the reason. To intervene – to try and help – put everything she did at risk.
By reaching out a hand to help this family, she rocked a boat that was barely steady.
She exposed herself to being understood in a way that she couldn’t be understood.
All the work she did – the meetings that weren’t meetings, the chance encounters that weren’t chance, the lunches and parties, the little bits of news and whispered gossip that came her way and were moved by her onwards to where others might find value in them – all that became impossible if she was seen to act in any way for Beatrice, Hannah, her father.
To become friends with them or allow her life to tangle with theirs was to threaten everything else she did.
The knowledge was hateful. She resisted it.
Until, having tried to bend it in her mind every which way, she realised there was no resisting.
To help them was to expose herself. She finished dressing and went to dinner and then a nightclub and was so very charming, so sophisticated and amusing, that a man she had long set her sights on because he was known to be close to Herr Goring drove her home as dawn was breaking and tried to kiss her. She let him, but only for a moment.
‘I must go up,’ she murmured. ‘The hausmeister is such a disapproving fellow, you cannot imagine …’
He laughed and she rested her head briefly on his shoulder.
‘You will visit me,’ he said urgently, ‘at my lake schloss. You must!’
‘I would love to.’ And she went upstairs and brushed her hair until her head hurt, because that was better than crying.
The next day, crossing the brown marble lobby, Doris saw Beatrice and Hannah come towards her.
She waved and stepped briskly past them.
‘I’m just on my way out,’ she called. Beatrice smiled and nodded.
And did the same a few days later when Doris, seeing them at the lift, said, ‘I have forgotten my purse, I must go back for it. Don’t stop the lift for me. ’
After that, a card was pushed under her door, inviting her to take tea again. She wrote a note of regret, put it under their door and walked quickly away. She heard her name called as she reached her own apartment, but pretended she had not and shut the door smartly behind her.
It didn’t take very long, she thought sadly.
Not long at all, before Beatrice understood and walked past Doris with no more than a nod when they encountered one another.
Hannah took a little longer, but soon she too, guided by her mother’s hand pressing into her shoulder, her mother’s quickened step and curt greeting, stopped trying to talk to Doris.
Soon, they no longer ran into each other, and Doris wondered did they plan their entrances and exits carefully to avoid her, as she now did to avoid them? If so, it was for the best.
And all the while, she waited, every day, for the sounds of Hannah’s violin.
She found that if she opened the little window in the bathroom that looked onto the dark side street, she could hear better.
She would get up in the morning, when the first sounds started, open the window and get back in to bed, and listen as Hannah scraped her way through the Dvo?ák, bits of Beethoven, some old hymns that Doris half knew.
She never got any better, but hearing her, knowing she was still there, was the greatest comfort.