Kitabı oku: «A Woman of War», sayfa 4
Berlin, March 1941
It was inevitable, and the one that nobody wanted: the baby of our fears.
‘Sister?’ Dahlia’s voice was already unsteady as she found me tidying the sluice.
‘Yes, what is it?’ My back still to her.
‘The baby in Room 3. It’s, erm—’
I spun around. ‘It’s what? The baby’s born, breathing?’
‘Yes, it’s born, and alive, but …’
Her blue eyes were wide, bottom lip trembling like a child’s.
‘There’s something not quite … his legs are …’
‘Spit it out, Dahlia.’
‘… deformed.’ She said it as if the word alone was treason.
‘Oh.’ My mind churned instantly. ‘Is it very obvious, at just a glance?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Anything else?’
‘No, he looks perfectly fine otherwise – a gorgeous little boy. Alert, he handles well.’
‘Has the mother noticed? Said anything to you?’
‘Not yet, he’s still swaddled. I noticed it at delivery, and again when I weighed him. I’m not imagining it, Sister.’
We both stood for a minute, searching in ourselves for the answer, hoping another would hurtle through the door and provide a ready solution. It was me who spoke first, eyes directly on her.
‘Dahlia, you know what we’ve been told. What do you feel you should do?’
With such knowledge I was already complicit in any decision, but if we covered this up, would I regret it? Would it be me as the ward lead who got a visit from the hospital administrator, and the Gestapo? Or would we both bear a secret and keep it within each other? Sad to say that in war, in among the Nazis’ pure breed of distrust, even your colleagues were unknowns.
‘I’m frightened of not saying anything,’ Dahlia said, visibly shaking now, ‘but he shouldn’t be … he shouldn’t be taken from his mother. They will separate them, won’t they?’
‘I think there’s a good chance. Almost certainly.’
Dahlia’s eyes welled with tears.
‘Are you saying you want my help?’ I spelled it out. ‘Because I’ll help if you’re sure. But you have to be certain.’
We locked eyes for several seconds. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said at last.
I thought swiftly of the practicalities of making a baby officially exist but disappear in unison. ‘Dahlia, you finish the paperwork and start her discharge quickly. I’ll delay the paediatrician, and we’ll order a taxi as soon as possible.’
Adrenalin – always my most trusted ally – flooded my brain and muscles, allowing me the confidence to stride into the woman’s room. I painted on a congratulatory smile, and in my best diplomatic tones I told her it would be in her best interests to leave as soon as possible, to forsake her seven days of hospital lying-in, to quit Berlin and to move to her parents’ house, where her father was dangerously ill and not expected to last the night. Wasn’t that the case? It was, wasn’t it?
She was initially stunned, but soon understood why, as we unwrapped the swaddling and she saw with her own eyes the baby who would be no athlete, but no doubt loving and kind and very possibly a great mind. I hinted heavily at his future in the true Reich, and she cried, but only as she dressed hurriedly to go home. We were taking a large gamble on her loyalties to the Fuhrer, but I had seen enough of mothers to know all but a few would lay down their lives for their child’s survival and a chance to keep them close. Looking at her stroking his less than perfect limbs, I wagered she was one of them.
Dahlia and I took turns in guarding the door, while I forged the signature of the paediatrician on shift. He saw so many babies, and his scrawl was so poor, it would be easy enough to convince him of another normal baby if the paperwork was ever questioned.
Dahlia’s face was a mask of white, and I had to remind her to smile as we shuffled the woman out of the birth room, as if leaving only hours after the birth was an everyday scenario. The baby was swaddled tightly, with only his eyes and nose visible to the world. The corridor was clear, and we moved slowly towards the labour ward entrance, the woman taking the pigeon steps of a newly birthed mother. Dahlia assured me a taxi was waiting, engine running.
‘Are you not transferring to the ward, Sister? Is everything all right?’ Matron Reinhardt’s distinctive tones ripped through the air, stern and commanding. I swore she could silence the clipping of her soles at will.
I spun on my heels, but gave Dahlia a gentle tug on her shoulder, which meant: ‘Stay put, don’t move.’
My face fixed itself. ‘Sadly, family illness means we need to discharge this mother early, Matron. A grandfather who is keen to see the little one, as the doctors think his time is limited.’
The woman turned her head, nodding agreement, lips pursed.
Matron stepped towards us, her face unmoved. She looked quickly at the woman, turned up the corners of her mouth slightly and said: ‘My congratulations, and my sympathies.’
Then to me: ‘Is the baby fit for discharge, Sister, properly checked?’
I thought I heard a slight squeak escape from Dahlia’s direction, but it could have been the baby, in protest at being held so tightly.
My beautiful friend adrenalin came to my rescue again, pushing courage into vessels where I needed it most. I smiled broadly, and in my best officious tones, stated: ‘Of course, Matron. Fit and healthy and a confident mother with the feeding.’
She took a step forward again and aimed a long, thin finger towards the blankets around the baby’s face. Matron – who rarely touched a baby, but who directed, admired and encouraged from afar – pulled at the woollen weave and said: ‘Quite the handsome fellow, isn’t he? I hope time is on your side, my dear.’ She aimed a sympathetic smile at the mother. ‘Perhaps you’d better hurry, if you have a journey ahead of you.’
Dahlia’s face tumbled with relief, and the woman was pulled in her slipstream towards the exit. I stood with Matron and watched them go, waiting for the third degree, and her inevitable request to look at the file in my hand, to crawl over the paperwork and the fiction within. She of all people would see through my lie. A bell for one of the delivery rooms rang, and I stood unmoved.
‘Better see who wants your help now,’ Matron said, gesturing towards the room, and stepped in the opposite direction.
We never spoke of that baby or referred to him again.
7
Eva
I must have drifted on the edge of real sleep for some time, because the maid woke me gently: Fräulein Braun was waiting. I had just enough time to check my appearance in the bathroom mirror (when was the last time I had done that?) before heading back to the main house. The corridors were eerily empty, with only shadows of bodies moving here and there. I was led into the main drawing room, vast and airy with a jade tinge, where she was waiting, dwarfed by the oversized, dark furniture. Somewhere in the background a small bird twittered, a flash of yellow in a hanging cage.
Fräulein Eva Braun stood up as I came in, offering a hand and a smile; she was average height but athletic-looking, a healthy sheen to her face and broad lips, with a touch of colour and scant make-up. Her hair was strawberry blonde, crimped and worn free, and she had on a plain, green suit – the skirt of which was strained below the waistband, its jacket barely hiding an unmistakable roundness. My eyes immediately settled on her abdomen, sizing up the gestation, while her hand instinctively went to her bump, a reaction signalling she was already attached to her baby and naturally protective. Lord knows this poor creature would need all the help it could get, a mother’s love being its best ally.
‘Fräulein Hoff,’ she said in a surprisingly small voice. ‘I am very happy to meet you. Please, sit down.’
Almost instantly, I felt that Eva Braun, mistress of Hitler or not, was no Magda Goebbels. She struck me as the girl next door, easily someone who might have worked in any of the large department stores in Berlin before the war, ready to help with a bottle of cologne in her hand. She had a potential and a smile that would have opened many a door. Maybe that’s what had charmed the most powerful man in Europe? Except I wasn’t sure if I should hate her for it.
She asked the maid for some tea, and we were soon alone. I sat without offering words, simply because I had nothing to say. There was a brief silence, split only by a crackle from the grate, and she turned squarely to face me.
‘I gather you have been told that I am expecting a baby …’ The words came out furtively, with a flick of her gaze, as if the dark, wooden walls were on alert.
‘I have.’
‘And that you were requested specifically to become my midwife. I hope that is acceptable to you.’
Possibly, she was unaware I had no real choice, of the emotional leverage involved, but still I said nothing.
‘You probably won’t know that several of my family’s friends have been cared for in Berlin during their pregnancies,’ she went on, ‘and your skills are highly thought of.’
Again, I only nodded.
‘You are also aware that, due to … circumstances, the birth of my baby—’ again she palmed her belly ‘—will be here. I want someone I can trust, who has the skills to deliver my baby safely. And discreetly. My mother was lucky enough to have the care of a good midwife several times, and I would very much like that too.’
She sat back, relieved, as if such a speech had winded her. Still, I didn’t know what to offer in reassurance. What I did know was that Eva Braun appeared, on the surface at least, an innocent. By design or sheer naivety it was hard to tell, but I couldn’t believe she had set out to sleep with a monster, let alone to carry his bastard child. The Nazi way was the family way; ‘Kitchen, children, church’ was their motto and good German wives were named as soldiers in the home, bizarrely rewarded with real medals for copious breeding. Eva Braun had broken with protocol. Her position was now untenable, her body and life no longer her own, at least while she carried the Fuhrer’s baby – and I had to assume it was his blood, given my treatment since leaving the camp. She looked neither like a soldier nor the accomplice of evil.
Rather than feign a false delight, I focused on the pregnancy – how far along she was, when the due date would be, what types of checks she had already gone through. She had seen a doctor to confirm the pregnancy, but no one since. The dates of her menstrual cycle suggested the baby was due in early June.
‘But I’m feeling the baby move now, every day.’ She smiled, almost like a child pleasing its teacher, the hand paddling again.
‘Well, that’s a very good sign,’ I replied. ‘A moving baby is generally a happy baby. Perhaps, if you would like, I could gather my equipment and do a check, just to see if everything is progressing normally?’
‘Oh, yes! I’d like that. Thank you.’ She exuded the glow of a thousand pregnant women before her.
Confusion draped again like a thick fog, twisting the moral threads in my brain. I was supposed to feel dislike towards this woman, hatred even. She had danced with the devil, created, and was now nurturing, his child. And yet she appeared like any woman with a proud bump and dreams of cradling her newborn. I wished there and then I was back in the camp, with Rosa by my side, where the world was ugly, but at least black and white. Where I knew who to seethe against, and who the enemy was.
I collected the new equipment from my room, and Fräulein Braun led me through a maze of corridors towards a bedroom. It was mid-size, comfortable but not ornate, family pictures on the mantel – holiday snaps of healthy Germans enjoying the outdoors. In all, there were three doors to the room: one we had come through, another leading to a small bathroom, and, on the opposite side, one linking to a second bedroom. I glimpsed a double bed through a crack in the doorway, a heavy brocade covering. She caught me looking and closed it quietly. And then it hit me. Was that his room? The leader of all of Germany, engineer of my misery, all misery at this point? Instantly, I wanted to find an exit from this surreal normality, but Fräulein Braun – my client – was already standing by her own bed, waiting.
‘Do you want me to lie down, Fräulein Hoff?’ Her face was full of expectation, of hope.
There were times in my career when I hated the automatic elements of midwifery. Early on, some of the labour wards in the poorer district hospitals had seemed like cattle farms – one abdomen, one baby after another. But now, I was thankful to my training, piloting my way through the check. With her skirt lowered, Eva Braun was any other woman, a stretching sphere to be assessed, eager to hear her baby was fit and healthy.
I pressed gently into the extra flesh she was carrying, kneading downwards until I hit a hardness around her navel. ‘That’s the top of your womb,’ I explained, and she gave a small squeak of acknowledgement. I pressed the Pinard into her skin and laid my ear against its flat surface, screening out the sounds of the house and homing in on the beating heart of this baby. She remained stock still and patient throughout – and I finally caught the edge of its fast flutter, only just audible, but the unmistakable rate of a galloping horse.
‘That’s lovely,’ I said, bringing myself upright, ‘a good hundred and forty beats per minute, very healthy.’
Again, her face lit up like a child’s. ‘Can you really hear it?’ she said, as if Christmas had come early.
‘The baby’s still quite small,’ I said, ‘so it’s very faint, but I can hear it, yes. And everything feels normal. It seems to be progressing well.’
She stroked the bump again and smiled broadly, muttering something to the baby under her breath.
We talked about how often she might want a check, when we would start planning the birth, if she might take one last trip to see her parents – a good day’s drive away. I realised I would be redundant for much of my time at the Berghof, amid this luxury, and the intense guilt rose up again. As I turned to go, she called behind me: ‘Thank you, Fräulein Hoff. I do appreciate you coming to care for me.’
And I believe she meant it, innocent or not. I didn’t know whether to be gracious for my life chance, or angry at her naivety. A thought flashed, ‘a child within a child,’ and I forced a smile in response, while every sinew in me twirled and knotted.
8
A New Confinement
I ate breakfast the next morning in the servants’ quarters. I was introduced as Fräulein Braun’s companion, yet no one asked where I had come from, or about my life during or before the war; everyone’s history, it seemed, had been washed away by the turmoil.
We had agreed I would see Fräulein Braun briefly each morning after breakfast, and once a week for a full check. In between, I would see her only if she needed me or had questions – this was all made clear in my first meeting with Sergeant Meier, who proudly introduced himself as I returned to my room.
‘And I needn’t make it clear you cannot leave the complex without Fräulein Braun,’ he added, ‘or her express permission – in writing.’
He gave a reluctant smile, his small, neat moustache rippling, wire-rimmed glasses sitting astride a short, pointed nose, topped by oiled, cropped hair. His creeping arrogance and the way he wore his sombre SS jacket made me shiver; I had seen a hundred SS guards wielding heavy coshes, lined up before a thousand powerless women. Before the war, this man had been small and insignificant. Conflict had granted him gravitas, and he basked in it.
‘Given where I have come from, Sergeant, I’m under no illusions about my place here,’ I said. ‘I’m still a prisoner, engaged in slave labour, however you want to dress it.’
‘Very comfortable slave labour, Fräulein,’ he said without skipping a beat. ‘Just remember that. And your family. Good day.’
The rest of January and into February passed slowly. The house was quiet, and I could only assume its chief resident was conducting the war from elsewhere. Fräulein Braun and I soon settled into a routine: I would go to her room after breakfast, enquire about her night, how the baby was moving, and if she wanted me to listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Once or twice a week I performed a full check, with her blood pressure and urine. She was healthy and there were no obvious problems.
The weather was bitterly cold, but on clear days the views were spectacular across the wide valleys below the house, and I was itching to venture further afield. Strangely, though, I never once thought of talking my way past the guards and out into the world. At times, it didn’t feel like a prison; I was treated with respect by Fräulein Braun, engaged in conversation with the other servants, and was tolerated by Frau Grunders. It was the constant spectre of my family’s future that kept me in check. If there was the tiniest chance that my compliance would allow even one of them to survive, it was a small price to pay.
I spent hours wrapped in my blanket in the corner of the wide, stone terrace attached to the main house, drinking in the winter sun and reading. On still days, the space was dotted with tables and striped sun umbrellas, giving it the feeling of a hidden and exclusive resort hotel. Fräulein Grunders had granted me blissful access to her bookshelves, and I was hungrily eating my way through volumes of German and English classics – Austen and Goethe, Dickens and Thomas Mann. The skies buzzed with small aircraft, possibly fighters, but up here, surrounded by the purest air, there was no hint of a war raging across the world; our cotton clouds bore no resemblance to the gun smoke below.
The war, in fact, seemed a lifetime away. Aside from the young jackboots who patrolled the complex, smoking in their breaks, there was no hint of anything untoward in the world at all. They were bored and eager to chat, wearing the guns slung across their shoulders like elaborate trinkets. In the camp, we’d had scant news from the outside world – only when a new inmate had been brought in did we learn which borders had fallen, or what new countries had been occupied. There were no newspapers, nothing by which we could judge our place in the great scheme. I presumed it was intentional, since our ignorance contributed to the regime of fear, to their ability to leverage our lives, and that of our families. Anything to isolate our humanity.
High on up in the Bavarian hills, we also seemed to be in a news black spot. I sometimes glimpsed a newspaper on Sergeant Meier’s desk and harboured a ravenous hunger for the print on its pages. But I also knew it was pure propaganda – as the daughter of a politics professor I had been taught to have a healthy disrespect for the media. ‘In the pocket of the politicos,’ was one of my father’s more familiar groans. ‘Always read between the lines, Anke. Accept nothing on face value.’ Any Nazi newspaper these days – slavishly controlled by Goebbels – was more fiction than fact.
In the servants’ hall, there was a small radio set, one of the Reich’s People Receivers, but it was rarely switched on, and conversation was limited to enquiring about immediate family who weren’t away in the war, or the plentiful meal in front of us. In fact, everything about the Berghof made it seem as though the war was an elaborate figment of our imaginations: the quality of the furnishings, the luxuries of soap, shampoo and even shoe polish, which were refreshed in my room regularly.
Inevitably, my waist started to fill out, my ribs gaining a fleshy coating, so that I could no longer tap on them like a xylophone and produce an echo. In the mirror, I noted a subtle change in my face, a gradual colouring coming into more rounded cheeks, and my hair became thicker, acquiring a slight sheen. I looked almost healthy. It was the old Anke I saw, but not one I recognised. My outer and inner selves were at strange odds with each other.
On one or two occasions that month, I was allowed to go further afield. Fräulein Braun usually took a walk after breakfast with her terriers, Negus and Stasi – I often saw her heading through the perimeter fence and along a path linking another hilltop area. One morning, after our usual meeting, she asked if I would like to go with her. When I said I didn’t have a coat, she looked slightly taken aback, and fished in her wardrobe for one that might fit me.
‘There, that should keep you nice and warm,’ she said, beaming, and for a split second the atmosphere was almost sisterly, as if we’d been swapping gossip for hours, teasing each other’s hair into the latest style.
Eva donned her sunglasses against the bright, white sun beating out to warm the icy air. Our breaths left brief trails as we headed down the frosty path, followed at a discreet distance by an armed guard, with the dogs gambolling on ahead. Conversation was stilted at first, given that there were few topics on which we could share, and many off limits. In the circles she mixed, she had picked up a certain amount of tact in chattering diplomatically, almost about nothing. We talked about some of our favourite films, our school days, and she told me a little about her family, whom she clearly missed. Her sister, Gretl, was often at the Berghof, since she was engaged to a senior officer in the SS, but she rarely saw her older sister, Ilse. When I revealed I had a sister of the same name, she smiled and seemed genuinely pleased we had a small thing in common. She stopped short of asking where my own Ilse was, and how she fared.
‘So, tell me about when you were working in Berlin, and the babies you delivered,’ she said, eager to know. ‘I often think it must be a lovely job. I think, if things had been different, I might have been drawn into nursing, or something like that.’ That was as far she came to alluding to the war and its catastrophic effect on the entire world below us, and not for the first time it made me question her true knowledge, or her willingness to ask.
I told her some of the positive stories about birth, of the quirkier events, but nothing of the downsides, the times when it could go wrong, and the emergencies we might have to deal with. The bitter part of me might have hinted at those, but it was an unspoken rule among midwives that we didn’t dwell on the negative side. After all, what was the point? Pregnant women were set on a journey, through the winding hours of labour and into motherhood, with no option of taking a shortcut. Why would I reveal it was potentially fraught with danger, reaffirming the old German view of childbirth as infected with jeopardy? As midwives, we knew intense fear could stop a labour in its tracks, with resulting consequences. We needed mothers to welcome it into their bodies, as much as anyone could invite pain and discomfort. Over endless hours of watching and waiting with women in labour, I was a firm believer that anxiety was our enemy, a generous dose of humour being the best medicine.
It took us half an hour to reach a turning point, a little clearing cut into the trees with a rectangular building on one end, part brick and part wood, becoming circular at the other end. Windows looked out onto the expanse below, across the border and into Austria. The dogs barked our arrival.
‘Quiet, you rascals!’ Eva chided them playfully.
The building was one main room, with the circular ante-room visible through an open door. Comfortable chairs were dotted around the walls and the wood floors covered with expensive rugs.
‘We call this the Teehaus,’ said Fräulein Braun, as the dogs flopped onto their embroidered cushions. She was pleased to be playing the hostess. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
She beamed as she offered me tea from a little stove, pre-lit and set for her trip – making her regular morning walks anything but arduous – and talked as she filled the cups.
‘We come here and take tea on some afternoons. On a clear day you can see for ten miles or so. The view is breath-taking.’ She didn’t look at me but the ‘we’ was heavily weighted for my benefit.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, as if I was in some kind of fairy tale myself.
‘Goodness!’ she said suddenly, as we finished our tea. ‘Time to head back. Frau Grunders will be calling for lunch and wondering where we are.’
I mused on what might be calling her away – to my knowledge, she hadn’t left the house in weeks. I’d overheard some of the maids gossiping about how full the Berghof used to be with a constant stream of guests. The social whirl, however, had stopped abruptly, no doubt at the Goebbels’ bidding. Eva flashed a naughty child’s grin, inviting me to be complicit in her mild mockery of the housekeeper, and I smiled back as a reflex. Unwittingly, Frau Grunders had helped us forge a small alliance.
