Cabbage Soup and Spaetzle, Piroggen, Blaubeere Küchen. The rush of memory left Dori reeling, falling back far into the past. Such food was common everywhere east of the Elbe. She saw her grandmother in her boots, stiff embroidered skirt, waistcoat, blouse and kerchief, feeding the geese down by the stream that chattered and rushed through their village. And in the corner of the house that served as the kitchen, wafting the fire to get the embers glowing, curtained by the bunches of herbs that hung from the beams, scraping little pieces of white dough from a wooden board, dropping them into the water. ‘This is how to do it, Dorota. Now you try.’ Spaetzle. Nokedli in Hungarian, Halušky in Slovak.
Dori claimed that she could neither cook, nor sew, it was part of her legend, but of course she could. No girl growing up in a village like hers could possibly be without those talents. Her grandmother had taught her in the one room that they used for everything. She could see her father’s big black boots standing next to the bed, the leather folded at the ankle, rounded to the muscular bulge of his calves; next to them, her mother’s slippers embroidered with green leaves and pink flowers.
As they sat and sewed together, Dori’s grandmother would tell her about her great-great-grandfather. How he had come from the north, a metal worker, marrying a girl from the village. He had laid the corner-stone where they were sitting now and had hauled great trees from the forest, shaping them into logs, building them up to form thick walls, hammering the beams holding up the steeply pitched roof of split spruce, weathered now from its first bright gold to dove grey. He had done all this himself. His name, Josef Kovácˇ, was carved into the great central beam, along with the year the house was built, 1796, and charms for protection, petal patterns enclosed in a wheel. He had driven nine long iron nails into the wood above the door, to keep out the Devil and the unquiet dead. Dori’s grandmother told her this as she taught her to embroider, sitting in the south-east corner, under the icon of the Mother and Child. Dori still had the kerchief, her first piece, the only thing she still owned from that time. ‘May the Mother protect us,’ her grandmother would mutter, as she bordered an apron with a repeating pattern: two triangles, one point balanced on the other, one arm up, the other down. The Mother. Sometimes, she carried flowers. ‘All the patterns mean something,’ her grandmother would say as they embroidered skirts, shirts, sheets and pillowcases. ‘Some are for men. Some are for women. Tulips, pomegranates, they are for fertility. Hearts for love. Birds, especially peacocks, those are for marriage.’ Dori shook out the piece she was embroidering. A nightdress embroidered with peacocks. Her grandmother was working on sheets with a frieze of tulips, pomegranates and hearts. She was fifteen. Betrothed to a boy from the next village. He was seventeen, tall and slender, his long, dark hair soft and slippery, his first moustache as soft as otter’s fur. Dori knew she couldn’t do it. She never threaded a needle again.
Instead, she hopped on a wagon and went south to Budapest. Here she met Tibor. He took her from the café where she was working and made her his mistress. She was sixteen. How old had he been? Fifty when she first met him? It had seemed impossibly old to her. He was also impossibly rich. He took her to his house in Buda, overlooking the Danube. There he taught her the Art of Love, as he put it, and much else besides.
When he was sent to Poland on a diplomatic mission, she went with him as his secretary. Things didn’t go well in Warsaw. She’d outgrown him, absorbed all he could teach her and more. It made him jealous, possessive in a way he hadn’t been before. He didn’t like to see her slipping out of his control. She began an affair with Andrzej Taczanowski, an officer in the 15th Poznań Uhlans Regiment. He was a Count, but then they all were. ‘Polish Counts are ten a penny, my dear,’ Tibor had told her. What really irked him, what he really hated, was Andrzej’s youth. That punctured his vanity. He could not compete with young flesh. It left him impotent in every sense of the word and he hated her for it. When he was recalled to Hungary, it was a relief for both of them.
Dori and Andrzej were married but it didn’t last. Someone else had walked back into her life. Bobby Stansfield, an RAF officer in Poland to train pilots. She had met him before, in Budapest, 1936. He’d turned up with a letter of introduction from Tibor’s cousin in Vienna. He’d been travelling on foot and on horseback. When she first saw him, he was dressed in a long brown hooded coat reaching to his ankles, high-backed trousers tucked into boots, an embroidered waistcoat over a homespun linen shirt. He looked like a goat herder, smelt like one, too, but so beautiful. Like an angel with dirty hands and face. The next time she saw him, he’d had a bath, a haircut, was wearing borrowed evening clothes and Dori was in love. They danced the night away but after several wonderful days and equally magical nights he was gone.
She wasn’t going to lose him a second time. They fled through the chaos of Poland falling. Andrzej was killed on the first day, cut down by machine-gun fire in a skirmish with German infantry that became famous as the Riding of Krojanty. There was never any charge, Polish sabres and lances against German tanks. That was a myth but Andrzej would have enjoyed the glory of it. All she’d thought at the time was, ‘Now I’m free to marry Bobby.’ God forgive her for that.
Their happiness had been all too brief. Within a year, he was dead, too. It was what had brought her here. She watched her notes blacken and curl. Memory, drifting up with the smoke in some kind of alchemy, had brought her full circle.
She stood up, wiping her cheeks with a quick sweep of her thumbs. Enough of this wool gathering. She fed the last note into the Aga. It was good to know that the system was working, although she was greedy for more than tantalizing titbits. They didn’t add up to a great deal: a contact that might, or might not, lead to Elisabeth von Stavenow. Doings on the black market. Goings on in the billet. Not much but something. Definitely something. That’s how it was, she reminded herself, a patient gathering. A foraging, a nosing up of morsels. Edith was proving to be good at that.
Dori went up to the hall and put on her coat and hat. She had places to be, people to see. Vera had discovered that the girls they had been searching for, the ones who ended up in Natzweiler, had been on a transport of prisoners from Paris to Karlsruhe. She was going to the prison where they had been taken to try to establish their exact identities. Meanwhile, Dori was to track down any others who might have been on that transport, or kept in that prison and could have seen the girls or heard their names. It was a patient piecing of information; a matching of statements, interviews, diary entries. They had to find out exactly what had happened and the girls had to be identified beyond doubt. They had that duty to the mothers and fathers, the husbands, sisters, brothers who were waiting, still waiting, writing anxious letters asking for any news, still clinging to the last shred of hope that their girl would walk through the door, just as they had so many times before, rather than having died a hideous death in a concentration camp.