Monday

When she woke up in the morning, it was pouring. She could hear the rain drumming on the window and dripping from the gutters even before she opened her eyes on the grey light of the room. In the garden, most of the leaves had been washed off the trees, and she hoped that the cat had found some shelter.

As she made her way downstairs, across worn carpets and past ancient, fading wallpapers, she noticed for the first time that what she was staying in was not a real hotel, but a private house, half-heartedly converted. There did not seem to be many other guests, for the breakfast room was empty except for an elderly man who got up and left as she arrived. She sat down at the only other table which had been laid, and at once a small bow-legged woman whom she dimly remembered from the previous day hurried in with a tray.

“Had a good sleep?” she asked in broad Berlinese. “You’re looking better today. When I saw you yesterday I thought to myself, that one’s had all she can take.”

“I’m fine now, thank you,” said Anna. As usual, she emphasized her English accent and spoke more haltingly than necessary. She had no wish to be thought even remotely German.

“I’ll bring you your breakfast.”

The woman was middle-aged, with pale hair so lacking in colour that it might have been either fair or grey, and sharp, pale eyes. As she scuttled in and out on her little legs, she talked without stopping.

“The gentleman phoned to say that he’d be calling for you at nine. It’s dreadfully wet out. String rain, we call it in Berlin, because it looks like long pieces of string, d’you see? I really dread going out to do the shopping, but I have to, there’s no one else to do it.”

As she talked, she brought Anna a small metal can of tea, butter, jam and bread rolls.

“Thank you,” said Anna, and poured herself some tea.

“I don’t do suppers, but I can always fix you up a boiled egg or some herrings if you should want them. Or a bit of cauliflower.”

Anna nodded and smiled in a limited way, and the woman, defeated by her English reserve, retired.

She looked at her watch. It was only a little after eight-thirty, she had plenty of time. She wondered how Mama was. Presumably the same, otherwise Konrad would have asked to speak to her when he rang. She buttered one of the bread rolls and took a bite. It tasted much as she remembered from her childhood.

“There are more rolls if you’d like them,” said the woman, peering round the door.

“No thank you,” said Anna.

When she was small, there had never been more than one roll each for breakfast. “If you want more, you can eat bread,” Heimpi who looked after them always told them while she and Max wolfed it down before school. She had been so convinced of the infallibility of this rule that once, pondering upon the existence of God and also feeling rather hungry, she had challenged Him to a miracle.

“Let them give me a second roll,” she had told Him, “then I’ll know that You exist,” and to her awed amazement Heimpi had actually produced one.

It had been a poor bargain, she thought. For months afterwards she had been burdened by the knowledge that she alone in a family of agnostics had proof of God’s existence. Though she found it exciting at first (standing talking to Mama and Papa, her hands secretly folded in prayer behind her back, thinking, “Little do they know what I’m doing!”), eventually it had become such a strain that Mama had asked her if she were worried about anything. She remembered looking at Mama in the sunlight from the living-room window, trying to decide what to answer.

As always in those days, she was worried not only about God but about several other things as well, the most urgent being a book of raffle tickets she had recklessly acquired at school and had found impossible to sell. Should she tell Mama about the raffle tickets or about God? She had carefully examined Mama’s face – the directness of her blue eyes, the childish snub nose and the energetic, uncomplicated mouth, and she had made her decision. She had told her about the raffle tickets.

As she sat chewing her roll in the shabby breakfast room, she wished she had told her about God instead. If it had been Papa, of course she would have done.

“I’m going now,” said the woman. She had put on a long, shapeless coat which concealed her legs, and was carrying an umbrella. On her head was a hat with a battered veil.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” she said.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Anna.

For a moment she had a glimpse of Mama in a hat with a veil. The veil was blue, it just reached the end of Mama’s nose, and it was crumpled because Mama was crying. When on earth was that? she wondered, but she could not remember.

Konrad arrived punctually, shaking the water from his hat and coat.

“Your mother’s pneumonia is a little better,” he said. “Otherwise she’s much the same. But I managed to speak to the doctor when I rang, and he said they were trying a different treatment.”

“I see.” She did not know whether that was good or bad.

“Anyway, he’ll be at the hospital, so you can speak to him yourself. Oh, and Max rang up from Athens. He’s hoping to get on a flight to Paris this afternoon, in which case he’ll be here either tonight or tomorrow.”

“Oh good.” The thought of Max was cheering.

“He only knows about the pneumonia, of course.”

“Not about the overdose?”

“He didn’t ask me, so I didn’t tell him,” said Konrad stiffly.

Watching him drive through the pouring rain, she noticed again how worn he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and not only his face but even his large body looked a little collapsed. Of course, he’s been coping with all this far longer than me, she thought. But as they approached the hospital, her stomach tightened as it had done the previous day at the prospect of seeing Mama, and she felt suddenly angry. If Konrad hadn’t had an affair with some wretched typist, she thought, none of this would have happened.

Unlike the previous day, the reception hall was full of bustle. Nurses hurried to and fro, the telephone kept ringing while a man in a raincoat stood dripping patiently at the desk, and immediately behind them an old lady in a wheelchair was being manoeuvred in from the rain under several black umbrellas. Of course, she thought, this was Monday. Yesterday most of the staff would have had the day off.

The nurse behind the desk announced their arrival on the telephone and a few minutes later a slight, balding man in a white coat came hurrying towards them. He introduced himself as Mama’s doctor with a heel-clicking little bow and plunged at once into an analysis of Mama’s condition.

“Well now,” he said, “the pneumonia no longer worries me too much. We’ve been pumping her full of antibiotics and she’s responded quite well. But that’s no use unless we can bring her out of the coma. We’ve made no progress there at all, so we’ve given her some powerful stimulants in the hope that these may help. You’ll find her very restless.”

“Restless?” said Anna. It sounded like an improvement.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid the restlessness does not mean that she’s better. It’s just a reaction to the drugs. But we’re hoping that it will lead to an improvement eventually.”

“I see,” she said. “What—” She was suddenly unsure how to put it in German – “What do you think is going to happen?”

He spread-eagled the fingers of both hands and showed them to her. “Fifty-fifty,” he said in English. “You understand? If she comes out of the coma – no problem. She’ll be well in a few days. If not…” He shrugged his shoulders. “We’re doing all we can,” he said.

At first, when she saw Mama, in spite of what the doctor had told her, she thought for a moment that she must be better. From the far side of the landing, with Mama’s bed partly obscured by a large piece of hospital equipment, she could see the bedclothes move as though Mama were tugging at them. But there was a nurse standing by the bed, doing something to Mama’s arm, and as she came closer she saw that it had been bandaged on to a kind of splint, presumably to stop Mama dislodging the tube which led to it from the bottle suspended above the bed.

Tethered only by her arm, Mama was lurching violently about in the bed, and every so often a strange, deep sound came from her chest, like air escaping from an accordion. She no longer had the tube in her mouth, but her eyes were tightly shut, and she looked distressed, like someone in a nightmare, trying to escape.

“Mama,” said Anna, gently touching her face, but Mama suddenly lurched towards her, so that her head almost struck Anna’s chin, and she drew back, alarmed. She glanced at Konrad for comfort, but he was just staring down at the bed with no expression at all.

“It’s the drugs,” said the nurse. “The stimulants acting on the barbiturates she’s taken. It causes violent irritation.”

Mama flung herself over to the other side, dislodging most of the bedclothes and exposing a stretch of pink nightdress. Anna covered her up again.

“Is there nothing you can give her?” she asked the nurse. “She looks so – she must be feeling terrible.”

“A sedative, you mean,” said the nurse. “But she’s had too many of those already. That’s why she’s here.”

Mama moved again and her breath came out in a kind of roar.

The nurse gave the bandaged arm a final pat where it was connected to the tube. “In any case,” she said quite kindly, “your mother is unconscious. She is not aware of anything that is happening.”

She nodded to Konrad and went.

Anna looked at Mama and tried to believe what the nurse had said, but Mama did not look unaware of what was happening. Apart from the fact that her eyes were closed, she looked, as she had so often looked in the past, as though she were railing at something. Death, or being kept alive. There was no way of telling which.

She hoped that perhaps Konrad would try to speak to her, but he just stood there leaning on his stick, with a closed face.

Suddenly Mama gave a tremendous lurch, her legs kicked the bedclothes right off and she fell back on to the bed with one of her strange moans. Her pink nightie which Anna remembered her buying during her last visit to London was rucked up round her waist, and she lay there, shamefully exposed on the rumpled sheets.

Anna jumped to tug down her nightdress with one hand, while trying to replace the bedclothes with the other. The nurse, reappearing from somewhere, helped her.

“Look at those legs,” she said, patting Mama’s thigh as though she owned it. “Marvellous skin for her age.”

Anna could not speak.

Once, in the Putney boarding house, Mama had rushed into their joint bedroom in great distress. It seemed she had been sitting in the lounge, her legs outstretched towards the meagre fire, trying to get warm, and a dreadful, crabby old man sitting opposite had suddenly pointed to somewhere in the region of his navel and said, “I can see right up to here.” Mama had been particularly upset because the old man was one of the few English residents, which seemed to make it much worse than if he had just been a refugee. “It was horrible,” she had cried and had collapsed on the bed to burst into tears. Anna had been filled with rage at the old man, but, while she comforted Mama with a kind of fierce affection, she had also wished quite desperately that Mama had just sat with her knees together like everyone else, so that none of it could have happened.

Now, as Mama threw herself about and they all stood looking down at her, she felt the same mixture of rage and tearing pity. She tried to tuck in a sheet, but it became dislodged again almost at once.

“I really think there is no point in your staying here at the moment,” said the nurse. “Come back this afternoon, when she’ll be calmer.”

Konrad touched her arm to guide her away from the bed. She pulled away from him, but she could see that what the nurse had said was true, and after a moment she followed him across the landing. Her last glimpse of Mama was of her face, eyes closed, the mouth emitting a wordless shout, as it rose into view behind some shrouded piece of equipment and then fell back again out of sight.

The reception hall was full of people in wet coats, and the smell of steaming cloth made her feel sick again. It was still pouring: you could see the water streaming down the windows. Konrad stopped near the door, where a little fat woman stood peering out, waiting for a break in the downpour.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to go to my office.” His voice sounded hoarse and unused, and she realized that he had hardly spoken since they had arrived at the hospital. “There’s a meeting this morning, and everybody would think it very odd if I didn’t turn up.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can look after myself.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to leave you here in this weather. I can just imagine what your mother would think of that.”

The little fat woman flung herself out into the rain, shooting her umbrella open at the same time, and disappeared down the steps. A cold breath of wet air reached Anna before the door closed behind her and she breathed it gratefully.

“I thought if I could find you an occupation for this morning, we could meet for lunch. There’s been a small exhibition here in memory of your father – your mother must have written to you about it.”

“Is there?” She did not want to see any exhibition, least of all one that would remind her of Papa.

He looked at her. “You’re feeling awful.”

“I think I’d just as soon go back to the hotel. Perhaps when Max comes tomorrow—”

“Of course.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll drive you back.”

Her coat was not particularly waterproof, and even the short distance to the car was enough almost to soak her. He looked at his watch again as she sat dripping on to the upholstery.

“You’ll never get dry in that hotel. The woman probably turns the heating down during the day. It’s a miserable place, but it was all I could find. Everywhere else was full.”

She shook her head. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I don’t want two invalids on my hands.” He started the car. “I’ll take you to my flat. At least I know it’s warm there.”

As they drove through the downpour, water blurred the windscreen in spite of the wipers, and she could hear it beating on the roof of the car above the sound of the engine. Every so often she caught a glimpse of streaming pavements, dripping awnings, bent figures running under shiny umbrellas. Konrad sat leaning forward over the steering wheel, trying to see the road ahead.

“What time is your meeting?” she asked.

He glanced down at his watch. “Five minutes ago. They’ll just have to wait.”

His flat was in a side street like that of the Goldblatts, and as he stopped the car outside it, water from a huge puddle in the gutter shot over the kerb and over the feet of an old man who shouted something and shook his umbrella at him. He insisted on holding the car door open for her, standing in the rain with water dripping from his hat, and then they both hurried across the pavement into the dry.

“I’ll be all right now,” she said as soon as he had ushered her into his hall, but he stayed, fussing over a hanger for her coat, telling her to make herself some coffee, and checking that the radiators were turned up.

“Till lunch, then,” he said, and then hesitated in the doorway. “By the way,” he said, “you will find a number of feminine possessions lying about. They are of course all your mother’s.”

“Of course,” she said, astonished. It would not have occurred to her to think anything else.

“Yes, well—” He waved awkwardly. “See you later.”

For a moment after the door had shut behind him, she stood in the dark little hall, wondering what to do. Then a trickle of water ran down her neck and she went into the bathroom to rub her wet hair with a towel.

As in the Goldblatts’ flat, everything was very new and modern. There was a shower, a big mirror and a bath mat with flowers printed on it. On the shelf above the basin were two blue tooth mugs, each with a toothbrush in it. She supposed that one of them belonged to Mama.

Konrad had put some instant coffee and biscuits ready for her in the kitchen, and she was just pouring hot water into the cup, when she was startled by the ringing of the telephone. At first she could not remember where the telephone was. Then she found it in the far corner of the living room. She ran over to it, picked up the receiver and discovered that her mouth was full of biscuit. Swallowing frantically, she could hear a German voice at the other end ask with rising insistence, “Konrad? Konrad, are you all right? Are you all right, Konrad?”

“Hullo,” she said through a mouthful of crumbs.

“Hullo.” The voice – a woman’s – sounded put out. “Who is that, please?”

She explained.

“Oh, I see.” The voice became very business-like. “This is Dr Rabin’s secretary speaking. Could you tell me what time Dr Rabin left his flat, please? Only he is rather late for a meeting at his office.”

Anna told her.

“Oh, thank you, then he will soon be here.” There was a little pause, then the voice said, “I am sorry to have troubled you, but you understand, his colleagues were getting rather worried.”

“Of course,” said Anna, and the voice rang off.

She went back to her coffee in the kitchen and drank it slowly. That must have been her, she thought. The girl in his office. She had sounded quite young. Somehow, it had not occurred to her that she would still be there, working with him. It seemed to make everything more uncertain. Poor Mama, she thought. But another part of her examined the situation in terms of plot and thought angrily, how corny.

When she had finished her coffee, she wandered round the flat. It was tidy, well furnished and impersonal. The curtains in the living room were almost exactly the same as the Goldblatts’ – obviously it was all American Army issue. There was a bookshelf with a few paperbacks, nearly all detective stories, and a desk with a framed snapshot of a middle-aged woman and two girls in their twenties – his wife and daughters she supposed. The woman was wearing a flowered dress with a home-made look. Her hair was swept back neatly into a bun and she had a sensible, faintly self-satisfied expression. A real German Hausfrau, thought Anna.

The bedroom was not quite as tidy as the living room. Konrad must have had a bit of a rush getting up. The cupboard door was slightly open and inside it she could see one of Mama’s dresses among his suits. Her pale blue bathrobe hung beside his on the door and her hair brush lay on his dressing table. Next to it and half-surrounded by the cord of his electric shaver was a small glass dish in which nestled some of Mama’s beads, a safety pin and half a dozen hairgrips.

She picked up the beads and ran them through her fingers. They were iridescent blue glass – Mama loved them and wore them all the time. Then she suddenly thought, but she doesn’t use hairgrips. Mama’s hair was short and curly. There was nothing to grip. Unless of course she had been washing her hair and had wanted to pin it in a particular way. That must be it, she thought. The fact that she had never seen Mama do this did not mean that it never happened. The hairgrips must be hers.

All the same, as she went back into the living room, she felt suddenly very much alone. It occurred to her that she really knew very little about Konrad. After all, he had presumably abandoned his wife for Mama. Might he not be ready now to abandon Mama for someone else? And what would Mama do then, even if she got better? She relied on him so much, not only for his love but for his help. After years of trying to cope alone with the family’s practical problems (and though Mama was more practical than Papa, thought Anna, she was still unpractical by most people’s standards) she had found it almost incredible that Konrad should be prepared to look after her.

“He is so good to me,” she had once told Anna. Anna had waited to hear in what way and Mama, too, had evidently found it difficult to describe. “Do you know,” she had said at last with a kind of awe, “he can even wrap parcels.”

It was still raining, though not nearly so hard. Outside the window, across the road, she could see the wet roofs of other American blocks of flats, one of them Mama’s.

She wondered what Mama had thought about when she took the barbiturates. She wondered if she had looked out of her window, if it had been wet or fine, if it had been dusk or already dark. She wondered if she had not had any regrets for the sky and the street lamps and the shadowed pavements and the sound of the passing cars. Clearly she must have felt that without Konrad they were not worth having. But perhaps she had not thought at all. Perhaps she had just been angry and had swallowed the pills, thinking, that will show him. Unlike Papa, she had left no notes for anyone.

There was some writing paper on Konrad’s desk, and she spent the rest of the morning writing to Richard. It was a relief to be able to tell him everything that had happened, from Konrad’s affair to her own reactions. When she had finished the letter she felt better. She stuck it down, put on her coat which had completely dried out on the radiator, slammed the front door as Konrad had told her, and went to meet him for lunch.

Probably because of the hairgrips and the telephone call, she felt uneasy as soon as she saw him. What shall I say to him? she thought. He was waiting for her in a small restaurant off the Kurfürsten Damm, newly rebuilt against a background of ruins still awaiting demolition. He rose at once to greet her.

“You found it,” he said. “I’d have come to pick you up in the car, but the meeting went on and on. And as the rain had stopped—”

“It was no trouble,” she said.

“I rang the hospital before I came out, and they think you should go and see your mother some time after four. They think she’ll be in a better state by then.”

“All right.”

“I can get away before five. I could drive you there.”

“There’s no need,” she said. “I’ll make my own way.”

There was an awkward little silence, then he said, “Anyway, you got dry.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Good news today about Hungary. Have you seen it?”

She shook her head.

“They’ve told the Russians to get out.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” He produced a folded newspaper from his coat pocket, but was suddenly hailed by a small man with rabbity teeth who had appeared at their side.

“My dear Konrad,” cried the little man. “I was hoping to see you.”

“Hullo, Ken,” said Konrad.

Was he pleased or annoyed at the interruption? It was impossible to tell. He introduced him, politely as usual, as Ken Hathaway from the British Council.

“Looking after the poetry side,” said Mr Hathaway, smiling through his teeth and looking disconcertingly like Bugs Bunny. He pointed to the paper. “Isn’t that amazing?” he cried. “Just told them to leave. Scram. Skedaddle. Vamoose. Back to Mother Russia. Mind you, I’m not surprised. Very fiery people, the Hungarians.”

“Do you think the Russians will really go?”

Konrad shrugged his shoulders. “It would be a very remarkable thing if they did.”

Mr Hathaway appeared to have sat down at their table, and after a moment – it must be because he, too, was finding it difficult to be alone with her, thought Anna – Konrad asked him to join them for lunch.

“I was so very sorry to hear of your mother’s illness,” said Mr Hathaway, and Konrad produced his usual vague phrases about pneumonia. Mr Hathaway managed somehow to make his teeth droop in sympathy. “Do give her my love,” he said. “I admire her so much.” He turned to Anna. “She has such enthusiasm, such a feeling for life – for living it to the full. I always think that’s a very continental quality.”

Anna agreed a little sadly about Mama’s enthusiasm for life, thinking at the same time how cross it would make her to hear herself described as continental. There was nothing Mama was quite as proud of as her British citizenship. She always referred to herself and the British as “we” (whereas Anna would go to infinite trouble to circumvent such phrases) and had once even talked, in her slight but unmistakable German accent, about “when we won the First World War,” to everyone’s confusion.

“And her feeling for the arts,” cried Mr Hathaway. “Her love of the theatre – I suppose that must have been nurtured by your father. But her music was her very own. To me, she stands for a very special kind of flowering, a special European—” He suddenly ran out of words and said, “Anyway, we’re all very fond of her here,” with such genuine feeling that Anna decided he was really quite nice, in spite of his teeth and his foolishness.

It was odd, she thought, but she had quite forgotten about Mama’s music. When she was small, the sound of the piano had seemed as much part of Mama as the way she looked. Every day while Papa wrote in his study, Mama had played and even composed. She’d been good, too, people said. But with the emigration, it had all stopped. If she had continued, would she have had something to hang on to in the present crisis instead of swallowing a bottleful of pills? And had she stopped because of the endless, crushing worries, or had the music never, really, been essential to her – only part of the romantic image she had of herself? There was no way of knowing.

“We’ll miss her on Wednesday,” said Ken Hathaway, and it transpired that he was giving a party to which both Mama and Konrad had been invited. “Perhaps you would consider coming in her place?” He smiled hopefully over a forkful of schnitzel.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” said Anna.

She was appalled at even thinking about Wednesday. Suppose Mama was still in a coma by then? Suppose she was worse? Then she saw Mr Hathaway’s face and realized how rude she must have sounded.

“I mean,” she said, “it must depend on how my mother is.”

“Let’s say I’ll bring her if her mother can spare her,” said Konrad, making everything normal again.

She knew that he was doing it for Mama’s sake, to make life easier for her if she recovered, but it still worried her that he should be so good at covering up.

“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked Ken Hathaway, who at once launched into an account of a poetry reading he had arranged, at which he hoped as many people as possible would turn up.

By Wednesday Mama may be dead, thought Anna.

A small German boy at the next table was eating cherry cake, and his mother was nagging him not to swallow the stones.

“What happens to people who swallow cherry stones?” he asked.

“What happens to people when they die?” Anna had once asked Mama in German, long ago when she was still a German child.

“Nobody knows,” Mama had said. “But perhaps when you grow up, you’ll be the first person to find out,” and after that she had been less frightened of death.

She must have eaten without noticing, for suddenly Konrad was paying the bill.

“Can I drive you anywhere?” he asked. “It’s still too early to go to the hospital. What would you like to do?”

“I thought perhaps I’d just walk about.”

“Walk about?”

“Where we used to live. It’s the only bit I remember.”

“Of course.”

He dropped her off where she asked him, having first provided her with a street map, as well as detailed instructions for getting to the hospital and then back to her hotel.

“I’ll ring you after six,” he said. “Look after yourself.”

She waved and watched him drive off.

It was not the first time she had been back to this part of Berlin. Two years before, she had walked here with Richard and Mama. She had pointed out to Richard all the places she remembered, and Mama had explained various changes which had happened since. They had chatted all the way – it had been a lovely day, she remembered – and she had been so happy that Richard and Mama were getting on so well that she had little time for any other emotions. Now, as she stood alone in the gusty wind, it felt quite different.

Konrad had dropped her at the end of the street where she had lived as a child. How ordinary it looked. She had to check the nameplate at the corner to make sure it was the right one.

When she was small, the street had always seemed to her very dark. The pavements were lined with trees planted at short intervals, and when Mama and Papa had told her that they were going to live there instead of their old flat in a perfectly good light street with no trees at all, she had thought, they’re mad, and had wondered dispassionately whatever foolishness they would get up to next. That had been in the summer – she must have been four or five – when the leaves had made a kind of awning right across the road. Now most of the leaves were on the ground, swept into piles in the gutter, and the wind blew through bare branches.

She had expected the house to be quite a long way down, but she reached it almost at once. It was hardly recognisable – she knew it wouldn’t be from her previous visit. Instead of their small family villa, it had been extended into a building containing three expensive looking flats. The gabled roof had been flattened and even the windows looked different.

Only the garden still sloped down to the fence as it had done in the past, and so did the little paved drive where Max had taught her to ride his bicycle. (“Isn’t there an easier way to learn?” she had asked him when, unable to brake or reach the ground with her feet, she had repeatedly crashed into the gate at the bottom. But he had told her there wasn’t, and she had believed him as always.)

Then she noticed that something else was unchanged. The steps leading up to the front door – now the entrance to one of the flats – were exactly as she remembered them. The steepness, the colour of the stone, the slightly crumbly surface of the balustrade, even the rhododendron bush wedged against its side – all this was exactly as it had been more than twenty years before.

She stared at it, remembering how, after school, she had raced up there, pulling at the bell, and, as soon as the door was opened, shouting, “Is Mama home?”

For a moment, as she looked at it, she remembered exactly what it had felt like to do this. It was as though, for a fraction of a second, she had half-seen, half-become the small, fierce, vulnerable person she had once been, with her lace-up boots and socks held up by elastic bands, her fear of volcanoes and of dying in the night, her belief that rust caused blood poisoning, liquorice was made of horses’ blood, and there would never be another war, and her unshakeable conviction that there was no problem in the world that Mama could not easily solve.

The small person did not say, “Is Mama home?” She said, “Ist Mami da?” and did not speak a word of English, and for a moment Anna felt shaken by her sudden emergence.

She walked a few steps along the fence and tried to peer round the side of the house. There had been some currant bushes there once, and beyond them – she thought she could still see the beginning of it – a kind of wooden stairway leading to the terrace outside the dining room.

In the hot weather she, or the small person she had once been, had sat on that terrace to draw. She had had a round tin filled with crayons of different lengths, old pencil shavings and other odds and ends, and when you opened it, these had emitted a particular, delightful smell.

Once, during her religious period, she had decided to sacrifice one of her drawings to God. First she had thought of tearing it up, but then that had seemed a pity – after all, for all she knew, God might not even want it. So she had closed her eyes and thrown it up into the air, saying – in German, of course – “Here you are, God. This is for You.” After allowing plenty of time for God to help himself, if He were so minded, she had opened her eyes again to find the drawing on the floor, and had put it calmly back into her drawing book.

Afterwards – or it might have been some other time altogether – she had walked through the French windows into the dining room, to find Mama standing there in a big white hat. As her eyes adjusted to the indoor darkness and the colours returned to the curtains, the tablecloth and the pictures on the walls, she had thought how beautiful it all was, especially Mama. She had looked at Mama’s face in surprise because she had never thought about her in that way before.

Beyond the terrace, out of sight at the back of the house, was the rest of the garden, probably neatly planted now, but in those days a grassless waste which Mama had sensibly handed over to Max and herself. There they had played football (herself in goal, vague about where the goalposts were supposed to be, uninterested in stopping the ball), they had wrestled and built snowmen and dug holes in the ground, hoping to reach the centre of the earth.

Once in the summer she had sat in the shade of the pear tree with Heimpi and had watched her embroider new eyes on her favourite stuffed Pink Rabbit in place of the glass ones which had fallen out.

When they had fled from the Nazis, Pink Rabbit had been left behind, embroidered eyes and all, with all their other possessions, and so had Heimpi whom they could no longer afford to pay. She wondered what had happened to them both.

The wind sang in the branches above her head and she walked on, past the place where she used to retrieve her tortoise as it tried to escape from the garden, past the place where a man had exposed himself to her on a bicycle (“On a bicycle?” Papa had said in amazement, but Mama had said – she could not remember what Mama had said, but whatever it was, it had made it all right, and she had not been worried about it).

At the corner of the street, where she and Max’s gang had always met to play after school, she stopped in surprise.

“Wo ist denn die Sandkiste?”

She was not sure whether it was she who had said it or the small person in boots who seemed, suddenly, very close. The sandbox, containing municipal sand to be scattered on snowy roads in winter, had been the centre of all their games. It had marked the dividing line between cops and robbers, the starting point of hide-and-seek, the place where the net would have been when they played tennis with a rubber ball and home-made wooden bats. How could anyone have taken it away? She and the small person in boots could not get over it.

But the rowan trees were still there. Vogelbeeren, they were called in German, and once Mama, seeing the red berries ripening, had cried regretfully, “Already.” When Anna had asked her why, Mama had said that it meant the end of summer.

A car passed, trailing petrol fumes, and the street seemed suddenly empty and dull. She walked back slowly towards the main road.

There was the paper shop where she had bought her drawing books and crayons, her exercise books and the special blue paper with which they had to be covered. She had gone inside it with Mama on her previous visit, but it was under different management and no one had remembered her. The greengrocer next door had gone, but the kiosk at the old tram stop was still there and still sold burnt sugared almonds in tiny cardboard boxes, even though there were no more trams, only buses.

Next came the café and, round the corner, the general shop, still two steps down from the pavement, where Heimpi had sometimes sent her on errands. Bitte ein Brot von gestern. Why had Heimpi always insisted on yesterday’s bread? Perhaps because it was easier to cut. The numbers of the trams were 76, 176 and 78. There was something unreliable about the 78, it did not always stop long enough. Once, as it passed him Max had put his gym shoes on the step – Turnschuhe, they were called – and had not got them back for two days.

Hagen Platz. Fontane Strasse. Königsallee.

This was where she had turned off to go to school. She had walked with her best friend Marianne who was older and could draw ears front view. “Quatsch!” she had shouted when they had disagreed, and Marianne had called her ein blödes Schaf, which was a silly sheep.

A flurry of leaves – Herbstblätter – blew along the pavement, and she felt suddenly disorientated. What am I doing here? she thought in German. Was tue ich eigentlich hier? Die Mami wartet doch auf mich. But where was Mama waiting? At home, beyond the door at the top of the worn stone steps, waiting to hear what had happened at school today? Or groaning and struggling under the covers of her hospital bed?

Something seemed about to overwhelm her. The clouds, piled huge and grey in the sky, seemed to press down on her head. (Die Wolken, she thought in slow motion, as in a dream.) The pavement and the leaves rose treacherously under her feet. There was a wall behind her. She leaned against it. Surely I’m never going to faint, she thought. And then, out of the shifting sky, an unmistakable voice addressed her.

“My dear, you look as pale as cheese,” it said, and a face surrounded by frizzy hair blocked out the rest of the world. She recognized the kindness before she remembered the name. Hildy Goldblatt, from the previous night. Of course, she thought, they live near here. A hand supported her arm. Another slipped round her shoulder. Then pavements and trees were swimming past and Hildy’s voice, like God’s, came out of nowhere. “What you need is a cup of tea,” she said. “Not, of course that they can make it properly here.” There was a sudden rush of warmth with the opening of a door, and then Anna found herself settled behind a table in the café with some hot tea before her.

“Now then,” said Hildy, “I hope you’re feeling better.”

She drank the tea and nodded.

Had she once sat at this table, eating cakes with Mama? But the whole place, flooded in yellow neon light, had changed too much for her to remember.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all been a bit overwhelming.”

“Of course.” Hildy patted her hand. “And worrying about your poor Mama. Mothers worrying about their children, that’s nothing, they’re used to it. But the other way round is always bad.” There was some cake on a plate before her and Anna watched her put some in her mouth. “Are you going to the hospital later?”

“Just for a moment.” She was afraid that Hildy would want to come with her, but Hildy only nodded.

“Good,” she said. “You will have your tea, and perhaps a cake – No? Are you sure? – And I will try not to talk like a chatterbox as Erwin always tells me, and then, when you are feeling better, I will put you in a taxi. All right?”

Anna nodded gratefully.

Behind Hildy, through the café window, she could see the pavement of the Königsallee. She and Max had passed that way each day on their way to school. Funny, she thought, you’d think it would have left some kind of a mark. All those times. On their own… with Mama and Papa… with Heimpi…

The waitress hovered. Hildy filled up her cup. “Ach ja, bitte noch ein Stückchen Kuchen,” and there was another piece of cake, apple this time, and Hildy was eating it.

“I saw your mother only two weeks ago,” said Hildy. “She showed me some pictures of her summer holidays,” and suddenly they were at the seaside, she was quite small and Mama’s face was above her, huge and smiling against the summer sky.

“Mami, Mami, Mami!” she squealed.

There was sand between her toes, and her woollen bathing suit clung to her wet legs and to her sandy body where Mama was holding her.

“Hoch, Mami! Hoch!”

She flew up into the sky. The sea was like a great wall at the end of the beach, and Mama’s face, suddenly beneath her, laughed up from the shining sand.

“She always enjoys everything so much,” said Hildy.

“Yes,” said Anna.

She could still see Mama, the brilliant blue eyes, the open, laughing mouth, and the blazing beach behind her. Like a vision, she thought. And then it faded, and there was Hildy at the other side of the table, looking concerned.

“I don’t want Mama to die,” she said childishly, as though Hildy could arrange it.

“Well, of course you don’t.” Hildy refilled her cup and stirred more sugar into it. “Drink,” she said.

Anna drank.

“I think your mother won’t die,” said Hildy. “After all, however it may seem just now, she still has very much to live for.”

“Do you think so?” The hot, sweet tea had warmed her and she was beginning to feel better.

“Of course. She has two nice children, a grandchild already, perhaps more to come. She has a job and a flat and friends.”

Anna nodded. ‘It’s just – she had a bad time for so many years.”

“Listen!” Hildy peered at her across the tea-cups. “My Erwin worked at Nuremberg. I know what happened to the Jews who stayed behind. They had a bad time.” And as Anna looked at her in surprise, “When you’ve finished your tea, you go to the hospital, and I hope your mother – I hope the pneumonia will be not so bad. And if she can hear you, you tell her it’s time she got better.”

“All right.” For the first time she found herself laughing, because Hildy made it all sound so simple.

“That’s right.” Hildy finished the last crumbs on her plate. “People,” she said, without explaining exactly whom she meant by them, “people shouldn’t give up so easy.”

At the hospital she was received by the nurse who had been on duty that morning. “Your mother is calmer now,” she said in German, and led Anna up the familiar corridors and stairs. For a moment, after her vision of Mama on the beach, it was surprising to see her grey-haired and middle-aged. She was lying quietly under the covers, her breathing almost normal, so that she might have been asleep. Only once in a while her head turned restlessly on the pillow and the untethered hand twitched.

Anna sat down on the bed and looked at her. She’s fifty-six, she thought. Mama’s eyes were tightly closed. There were deep frown lines between them, and two further lines ran to the pulled-down corners of her mouth. The chin had lost some of its firmness, it was pudgy now rather than round. The hair straggled on the pillow. But in the middle of it all was the nose, tiny, snub and incongruously childish, sticking up hopefully from the ageing face.

When I was small, thought Anna, I used to have a nose like that. Everyone had told her that her nose was just like Mama’s. But then, some time during her adolescence, her nose had grown and now – though it certainly wasn’t a Jewish nose, Mama had said – it was straight and of normal length. Somehow Anna always felt that she had grown up past Mama along with her nose. Hers was a more serious nose, an adult nose, a nose with a sense of reality. Anyone with a nose like Mama’s, she thought, was bound to need looking after.

Mama stirred. The head came a little way off the pillow and dropped back again, the closed eyes facing towards her.

“Mama,” said Anna. “Hullo, Mama.”

Something like a sigh escaped from the mouth, and for a moment she imagined that it had been in reply to her voice, but then Mama turned her head the other way and she realized that she had been mistaken.

She put her hand on Mama’s bare shoulder, and Mama must have felt that, for she twitched away very slightly.

“Mama,” she said again.

Mama lay motionless and unresponsive.

She was about to call her again when, deep inside Mama, a sound began to form. It seemed to rise up slowly through her chest and her throat and finally emerged roughly and indistinctly from her half-open lips.

“Ich will” said mama. “Ich will.”

She knew at once what it was that Mama wanted to do. Mama wanted to die.

“Du darfst nicht!” she shouted. She would not allow it. She was so determined not to allow it that it took her a moment to realize that Mama had actually spoken. She stared down at her, amazed and with a kind of anger. Mama tried to turn her head away, and the strange sound rose up in her again.

“Ich will,” she said.

“Nein!”

Why should she remember, now of all times, about the pencil sharpener that Mama had stolen from Harrods? It was a double one in a little pig-skin case, and mama had given it to her for her fourteenth or fifteenth birthday. She had known at once, of course, that Mama could not possibly have paid for it. “You might have been caught,” she had cried. “They might have sent for the police.” But Mama had said, “I just wanted you to have it.”

How could anyone be so hopelessly, so helplessly wrong-headed, stealing pencil sharpeners and now wanting to die?

“Mama, we need you!” (Was it remotely true? It didn’t seem to matter.) “You must not die! Mama!” Her eyes and cheeks were wet and she thought, bloody Dr Kildare. “Du darfst nicht sterben! Ich will es nicht! Du musst zurück kommen!”

Nothing. The face twitched a little, that was all.

“Mami!” she shouted. “Mami! Mami! Mami!”

Then Mama made a little sound in her throat. It was absurd to imagine that there could be any expression in the toneless voice that came from inside her, but to Anna it sounded matter of fact, like someone deciding to get on with a job that needed to be done.

“Ja, gut,” said Mama.

Then she sighed and turned her face away.

She left the landing in a state of confused elation. It was all right. Mama was going to live. Your little brother will play the violin again, she thought, and felt surprised again at the corniness of it all.

“I spoke to my mother and she answered me,” she told the nurse. “She’s going to get better.”

The nurse pursed her lips and talked about the Herr Doktor’s opinion, but Anna did not care. She knew she was right.

Even Konrad was cautious.

“It’s obviously an improvement,” he said on the telephone. “I expect we’ll know more tomorrow.” He had heard from Hildy Goldblatt about her moment of faintness in the Königsallee and was anxious to know if she were all right. “I’ll come and pick you up for supper,” he said, but she did not want to see him and told him that she was too tired.

Instead, she ate scrambled eggs served on a not-very-clean tablecloth in the deserted breakfast room and thought about Mama.

The bow-legged proprietress hovered nearby and talked – about the Nazis (she had never been one, she said), about the concentration camps of which she had known nothing, and about the bad times just after the War. No food, she said, and such dreadfully hard work. Even the women had to clear the rubble.

Her Berliner voice, a bit like Heimpi’s, like all the voices of Anna’s childhood, went on and on, and, even though Anna believed little of what she said, she did not want it to stop. She answered her in German and was surprised to find that when she really tried, she could speak it almost perfectly.

“Is’ doch schön, dass es der Frau Mutter ’n bischen besser geht,” said the woman.

Anna, too, was glad that Mama was a little better.

“Sehr schön,” she said.