Authors: Esther Freud
‘And no news of Gaglow?’ I went through to the bathroom to undress. It was February, and for the first winter of my life my hands and feet were warm. My shoulders hadn’t risen up to fight the cold and great flows of blood gave colour to my face. ‘I feel fantastic,’ I whispered to myself, and in a sudden rush of joy I unclipped my dungarees and dropped them to the floor. My vest had rolled up to my ribs and my stomach stuck out at an angle like a bean. ‘Couldn’t you make a bargain?’ I called, standing sideways at the mirror, seeing how far out I’d have to lean to see my toes. ‘If he finds Gaglow for you, then you’ll consider paying his commission on the rest?’
‘I’m ready,’ he said instead, and I walked through to find him waiting, brush in hand, the easel wheeled round into position.
‘But then again,’ my spirits were much too high for quiet, ‘I don’t suppose it’s just up to you.’ As I lay down on the sofa, old springs and strips of cloth sang out with the strain.
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it’s not just up to me. There are all my ghastly relatives.’ And he set about mixing more paint.
As soon as we stopped for our first break I scrutinized the letter. ‘Gottfried Gessler.’ The signature looked sly, and I wondered if my father’s various cousins, whom I’d never met, had also heard from him.
Pam met me at the hospital. ‘Are you all right?’ She held my hand, and each time a door flew open we both looked up.
The baby was due in four weeks’ time and it still hadn’t turned round. ‘It’s a big baby,’ the doctor had warned, ‘and not likely to move now on its own.’ He’d prodded my side, feeling for its feet, and my stomach, smooth and tight as calf, lurched a little to the left.
‘Apparently my doctor is the king of baby turning,’ I whispered to Pam. ‘He has an eighty per cent success rate,’ and then, lowering my voice still further, I told her that I knew my baby wasn’t going to turn.
‘Don’t say that.’ She winced, thinking of the alternatives, but I was busy with a hot sensation of pride.
‘It’s you.’ Pam pulled me up. ‘It’s you,’ and at the end of the corridor a nurse was calling for Miss Linder.
Pam stood back and gazed into the swirling screen hoping for some hint of the sex. The heartbeat thundered, fast and loud, while Dr Mok bent by my side. ‘I’m trying to get it to flip over like this,’ he explained, and he began to knead and squeeze. The baby, as I’d predicted, dug in its heels and refused to move. Soon its whole small body was squeezed up under my ribs but its head would not slip down. ‘It doesn’t want to turn,’ I pleaded, looking to Pam to intervene but the doctor insisted on one last go.
‘Stubborn little fellow,’ he huffed then, giving up, and I laid protective fingers on my baby’s head, feeling its back uncurl while two small feet stretched luxuriously down to trample on my bladder.
‘I’m badly in need of tea and cake,’ I gasped as soon as we were out.
Pam took my arm. ‘Not unattractive, your doctor, don’t you think?’
‘He’s the worst type of man.’ I laughed her down. ‘I see your taste hasn’t improved.’
But she only raised her eyebrows at me to show I didn’t stand a chance. ‘Excuse me?’
‘OK, OK. You win,’ and we hurried across the road towards a café.
‘Pam?’ She knew what I was going to ask her. I was sitting sideways in a booth, watching as our plates of strawberry cake sailed high towards us. ‘Could you . . . would you be able to bear it, you know, to be at the birth, if it turns out to be a – an operation?’
‘You’re not seriously telling me you’d be awake?’ She looked down at the veins of juice marbling her cake.
I nodded.
‘Are you sure you won’t want Mike, after all . . . or your mother, or . . .’
‘No.’
‘But you can’t stop Mike, not if he wants to come.’
‘Who says he wants to?’ And then, overtaken by a rush of fear, ‘you haven’t been in contact with him, have you?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’ While she blew smoke over her shoulder I finished every last crumb of my cake, scraping up the pool of cream with the flat side of the fork.
‘So,’ Pam leant towards me, grinning, ‘you still think it’s a girl?’
I shook my head, my hands hovering to clamp over my ears.
‘Because from looking at that screen . . .’
‘Stop it!’
‘. . . I could tell absolutely fuck all.’
I laughed. Relieved and disappointed. ‘Would you really want to know if it was you?’
‘Would I?’ Pam lit another cigarette. ‘I’d like to know now and I’m not even pregnant.’
‘Pam.’ I was tired suddenly. ‘If you really can’t face it . . . I would understand.’ But she was reaching for my hand, insisting there was nowhere in the world she’d rather be.
Pam bought herself a mobile phone and rang me several times a day to check I wasn’t trying to get through, ‘I was on the tube for almost an hour, getting to some stupid audition,’ and I felt guiltily hopeful each time she didn’t get the job.
We never discussed the possibility that she might be called away. Almost every day there was another threat. An advert in Istanbul, a play in Hull, a small part in a film, which lost its backing just in time. Dr Mok wanted me to book in for a Caesarean but, stubborn as my child, I had to wait and let the baby choose its day. The midwives frowned and fussed, not wanting to be bothered with an emergency in the middle of the night, but there was nothing they could do to force me.
And then, just when I was all prepared, I had a call from Mike. I was sitting on the floor deep breathing, taking air in through alternate nostrils, when I reached over and picked up the phone.
‘It’s me.’
My heart thumped and for a moment I was tempted not to recognize his voice. ‘Oh, hello,’ I offered instead, in a cheery, casual tone. There was a pause. For all he knew I’d already had our baby and it was lying sleeping on my arm.
‘I bumped into Pam . . .’ he stammered, ‘and she told me . . . she said the baby’s breech . . .’
Suddenly I couldn’t speak. Why was I sitting all alone leafing through a book of yoga poses, skipping out the ones where men massaged their pregnant partners’ feet?
‘I just wanted to tell you I was breech as well.’ He sounded triumphant. ‘I was a Caesarean, and my mother insists it’s the best way by far to have a baby.’
All my self-pity dropped away. ‘So what you’re saying,’ I lunged into the phone, ‘is that this baby is already taking after marvellous you?’ and winded by my rage I slammed down the receiver.
For a moment I sat cross-legged and serene, staring hard at the next exercise, and then, unable to pretend, I rolled on to my side and sobbed until the tears had mushed a soft patch on the floor and the salt against my face began to sting.
I never mentioned Mutti to my sisters. For all I knew there had been other visits, similarly disastrous, which we all kept to ourselves. But when we next met up I inspected them more closely. Natasha was the eldest. She had thick dark hair that turned wild when it was brushed and her eyes were lashed with black. She was tall, her shoulders straight and high, her nose just like our father’s. Kate was only four months younger. She was fairer than Natasha with honey-coloured skin, and although they’d never met as children, the mannerisms of their lips and hands were unusually alike. Until now I’d considered myself the odd one out. I was two years younger, slight and brown, with olive eyes and a lopsided mouth. ‘My little changeling,’ my mother had once called me, but now with my new eye for family traits I saw that this was not the case. It was even possible I was the real Linder. ‘You do look like my mother, it’s true.’ I hummed over my father’s words, and it gave me new confidence in his heart.
*
A few years later, without our having met again, my grandmother died quietly in her sleep. I asked if I could have a photo.
‘Of course.’ My father chose the picture I’d admired of the three girls dressed in summer white, smiling and lounging on the porch. He also gave me a photograph of Eva by herself. She stood in profile, her shoulders back, her eyelids lowered and her almost perfect nose sloping straight down towards her chin.
‘You look so like her!’ My sisters stared hard at the portrait, tracing the bobble of the chin. ‘It’s amazing.’
I flushed and bit my lip, wondering why it made me feel so ridiculously glad. ‘I’ll order you both a print,’ I offered, but Natasha said she’d prefer a copy of the sisters, Eva, Martha and Bina, lounging on cane chairs, and Kate agreed that she’d like one as well.
The photograph was still in its frame, the polish of the wood worn out at the corners, and it was tricky to remove the back. One clip snapped off in my hand and then the back came away. The smell of dust and old sweet powder made me sneeze. At first I thought the photograph was unusually thick, printed on to cardboard, but as I held it up I realized there was a second, smaller picture welded to its back. I peeled it carefully away and found the close-up picture of a man. He was dressed in uniform, the high-collared uniform of the First World War, and he looked confident and hopeful, staring straight into the lens. His hair was brushed back from his face, and his chin rested on one hand, a hand so fine and smooth I guessed the portrait must have been made before he ever went to war. ‘Emanuel Belgard’ was written on the back.
I showed it to my father. ‘Who is this, do you know?’ He turned the photo over in his hands, marvelling at the different shades of grey. ‘How extraordinary.’ He traced the fine inked letters of the name. ‘My uncle Emanuel. My mother’s elder brother.’
‘An uncle, but I thought it was just three girls, your mother and two sisters?’
‘No.’ My father was impatient suddenly to begin work and he fixed the canvas with such a sharp look of concentration that I had to save my questions for another time.
I left the picture of Emanuel Belgard lying out, intending to find out more about him, but eventually, assuming he must have been killed during that war like so many other millions, I put him for safekeeping back behind his sisters, clipping them all shut together in their frame.
‘It’s the war, it’s the war,’ Bina sang, when a letter arrived for Emanuel with a date and a time for him to report to his superior officer. She ran to the cupboard where his National Service uniform hung and struggled to pull it down. Emanuel took it from her and held it up against himself. The oval of his face seemed to shrink and pale above it.
‘When you’re home again,’ Bina began, but her mother reached for the uniform and, handing it to Dolfi, ordered that it should be pressed and aired and kept out of sight until the moment it was needed.
‘But when you do come home on leave,’ Bina continued, ‘will you bring –’ But she was cut off by Fräulein Schulze who arrived in high colour to hear the news and knocked a china ornament to the floor where it cracked into three jagged pieces.
Emanuel left the room. ‘Go after him, Eva,’ Marianna urged, and Eva ran and caught hold of his hand, while Martha and Bina, Omi Lise and his mother all stood in the doorway and called for him to come back and join them for late breakfast.
Wolf Belgard was in Berlin, inspecting a new warehouse. Marianna sent frantic messages for him to return to Gaglow, but Emanuel followed these with messages of his own, insisting that he should not interrupt unfinished business, and that in his opinion the mobilization of men was nothing but a show of strength. The war, if there was one, would be over within a month.
Gruber dressed in his finest livery to drive the short distance to the train. He stood sweltering in gold and blue, flicking the reins with proud, tightly cuffed wrists. Marianna had a hat with flowers in its brim and she sat beside Emanuel longing to clasp his fingers in her hand. Bina, Martha and Eva sat across from her, their backs to the horses.
‘Will you be fighting alongside Josef Friedlander?’ Bina asked, blushing darkly.
Martha nudged her. ‘Was he the one at the party with the curled moustache?’
‘With the drooping ears, you mean,’ Eva added.
Marianna frowned at them, and made a mental note to look up the Friedlander mother and see what kind of woman she was.
There were men at the station still in civilian clothes. They jostled and waved and shouted to each other as the train pulled in. It burst with startled faces, full of bravado, straining out at every window, and hundreds of men, sitting in the glaring light, bareheaded in the open trucks that had been attached to the back carriage.
Messages had been scrawled in great exclaiming letters across the doors, ‘To Paris’ and ‘To Victory’. Wives and sisters had added hearts and their own private messages of hope. Emanuel recognized many of the faces fighting for space. There was the son of the blacksmith, and the boys who worked as gardeners on the estate. He smiled at them and they grinned in his direction, clearing a small space around him as he stood stiffly in his heavy jacket, the buttons buffed, and his trousers tucked neatly at the knee into shin-tight leather boots.
Marianna stood close beside him and the scent of flowers from her hat filled his nose and mouth. ‘Will you write?’ she asked, putting her hand on his arm. Emanuel began to move towards the train.
‘Manu, Manu,’ his sisters called after him. Feeling himself about to sneeze he jumped aboard and Gruber followed with his bags.
As the train pulled away he saw his mother and three sisters standing with the throng of other women, all in white ruffled high-necked shirts, and hats and scarves against the sun. Their arms waved in a fluttering sea of gloves and fingers and he had to keep his eyes fixed on the blue ribbon in Eva’s hair so as not to lose sight of his own reeling family.
Marianna was silent as the carriage drove them home. From under the brim of her hat she let her gaze pass over the faces of her daughters. Today it made her smile to think how many hours of her life she’d given to worrying that Emanuel would be her only child. He had been born within a year of her marriage, and it still stung her eyes to think how delighted she had been with him. How she had dressed him and washed him and insisted that the nurse wake her if he cried during the night. ‘It’s all very well,’ Wolf teased, ‘but how will you manage when you have six sons all howling after you?’ and he had placed an expectant hand on the flat of her stomach. But the years passed and with each month the familiar dragging ache in her knees signalled, yet again, that she had failed to catch the beginning of a life.