Wild Boar Steinhof
A robust dish from the north. A reminder of times gone and places lost forever. The boar is marinaded in a strong red wine, pungent with juniper and thyme from the forest, onions and carrots from the kitchen garden, strong spices – clove and peppercorns. The cooking is long and slow. A dish from the past, a fragrance and flavour that lives on now only in memory.
‘Not far.’ Edith smoothed the creased scrap of paper. ‘It must be up here somewhere.’
Had the boy got it right? Could Elisabeth be here? Part of her hoped he’d got it wrong. After so long, what would they say to each other? So much had happened, so much was altered. All the dreadful things that she’d learnt about Kurt. How much did Elisabeth know? More than years measured the gap between then and now.
Edith made herself concentrate on the numbers as Jack crawled along Möllnstrasse. It was the right kind of area, or had been once. Elisabeth’s cousin might well have had a town house here. The handsome houses had escaped bombing but they showed every sign of dereliction and decay: roofs sagging, eaves rotting, windows boarded, wide gravel paths weed choked, steps broken, woodwork ripped away for firewood. A few were burnt out, looted by DPs or slave workers when the original residents, dead or displaced, failed to return. None of these houses would be empty. Every scrap of shelter was precious, fought over, in a city swelled to more than twice its normal size by refugees.
As they bumped along the rutted road, the houses grew better kept. These would be in the greatest danger. Edith could not see anyone at the windows or shutters but she could feel eyes watching. There was no fear of looting. Those days were over. What the residents feared now was the delivery of a British Requisition Order. Everyone to vacate the premises with what they could carry. The house taken over for billets, messes, offices, whatever the British saw fit.
There was a lorry parked at the foot of the drive to a large house. Edith couldn’t see a number but she was pretty sure that this was it. Soldiers stood about smoking, lounging against the lorry’s dropped tailgate, enjoying the weak winter sun, listening to an argument going on. Jack stopped the car and got out. He nodded to one or two of the men, exchanging a cheery greeting. They grinned back. Looked like their man was getting the worst of it. He was being addressed by a woman standing at the top of a flight of steps. She was speaking English, her clear, ringing voice held just the trace of an accent. Edith knew the voice immediately. She had found Elisabeth.
The sergeant stood holding a clipboard in front of him, like a shield.
‘You were warned a week ago now. You should have vacated. You must leave immediately.’
‘But we have many families living here.’ Anxious faces watched from the windows. ‘You will make thirty, more, people homeless. Women. Old people. Children. Where shall we go?’
‘That’s not my concern,’ he went to mount the steps but she blocked his way. ‘You were given notice. Alternative accommodation should have been found for you.’
‘But we’ve heard nothing about other accommodation! How is that even possible with the town as full as it is?’
‘That’s not my department,’ he said with triumphant finality, as though that settled the matter. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’
He tried to push past her. She held absolutely no power in this exchange but she was ready to stand her ground. Edith feared a tussle and was about to intervene when Jack touched her arm.
‘A word, ma’am.’
He spoke rapidly, gesturing towards the sergeant and the lorry behind them.
‘I see.’ Edith straightened her back, squared her shoulders and moved down the drive towards them. She deliberately didn’t look at Elisabeth, concentrating her attention on the requisition sergeant: small of stature, self-important, hiding inside his uniform. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ He turned, his mouth a snarl beneath his bristling, shredded-wheat moustache.
‘I’m the Education Officer for this District. I came to see why the children who live here are not attending school.’
‘Got more things to worry about, I should reckon.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Like where they’re going to kip. This house has been requisitioned.’
‘What for exactly?’
The man looked at his sheet. ‘Offices. Not that it’s any of your business.’
‘What is your name?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I like to know with whom I’m dealing.’
‘Wilkins, as it happens. What’s yours?’
‘Miss Edith Graham.’
‘CCG type.’ There was a sneer in his voice, but Edith let that go.
‘I hold the equivalent rank of Lieutenant Colonel.’
‘That’s by the by, love.’ Wilkins looked back down at his clipboard. ‘Orders is orders. This lot out,’ he pointed to the woman standing above him. ‘That lot,’ he jerked a thumb behind him, ‘in.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Edith took a step closer.
‘Oh? And what would you have to say about it?’
‘Not me. My driver. Sergeant Hunter. I think you might know each other?’
Jack gave a mock salute. ‘Wotcha, Wilko.’
‘And your superior. Captain Morrison, isn’t it? Jack was asking if you’ve been down to the Böttcherstrasse lately. Or has it moved to somewhere else now?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His voice had lost its sneer and was edged with nervousness.
‘I think you do.’
He frowned, his small mouth pursed, considering. He tapped his pencil on his clipboard, in rapid staccato. Some of the men involved in requisition did a tidy amount of business, redirecting Government Issue, selling off goods and furnishings ‘liberated’ from the houses they took over, buying up more, arranging for the most valuable items to be shipped back to Britain, or sold on in Brussels. There was big money involved, according to Jack.
‘Well?’
Sergeant Wilkins looked at her. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses, the last spark of arrogant authority flickered and died.
‘I got my orders,’ he said sulkily.
‘Haven’t we all?’ Edith smiled, she knew she’d won. ‘Mine are to get children into school. How can I do that when you people keep making them homeless? Now,’ it was time to take charge. He was only a sergeant, after all. ‘I suggest that you tell your superior that these premises are unsuitable. That shouldn’t be too difficult and should get you out of a bind.’
‘What am I supposed to do with that lot there?’ He gestured towards the lorry.
‘What does it contain?’
‘Desks, tables, chairs, filing cabinets. Office furnishings.’
Edith smiled. She knew the perfect place for it. ‘As of now, it has been redirected. Jack will show you where to take it.’
‘If you say so.’ He turned and stomped down the steps towards his men. ‘No skin off my nose.’
The lorry drove off in a cloud of blue exhaust.
‘Edith? It’s you, isn’t it? You are like an angel sent from heaven! I don’t know how to thank you.’ Elisabeth ran down the rest of the steps and took Edith in her arms. Then she held herself away, examining Edith’s face. ‘You dealt so well with him. Such authority.’ She regarded Edith with a bemused smile and a slight shake of the head, as if trying to reconcile the woman she’d known with the one standing before her with all the confident assurance that her uniform gave her. ‘I didn’t think to see you here. Now. After – everything – but the strangest things happen.’
‘I’m so, so glad to see you!’ Edith blinked back tears of absolute relief and genuine joy at seeing Elisabeth. ‘To know you’re safe!’
The search was over. Edith breathed the slightest trace of gardenia as she took Elisabeth back into a tight embrace.
They broke apart to look again at each other, searching for what was the same, what was different. It had been seven years and five of those had been war, which had changed everything and everyone. Had Elisabeth also been sullied by the regime her husband had so enthusiastically embraced and that had infiltrated every single aspect of national life? Impossible to tell yet but she was certainly different from the woman that Edith had first met. There were shadows under Elisabeth’s eyes and fine lines at the outer corners. Her face was thinner, but the hollows in her cheeks only emphasized her fine bone structure; her pale skin made her almost ethereal. She was still lovely.
Edith smiled as she followed Elisabeth into the house, brushing aside any doubts, her jublilation silencing any faint drumbeat of suspicion. The wide hall was lined with makeshift cots, to what must once have been a pleasant morning room at the back of the house. It was now divided by a crude wooden partition with a baby crying on the other side and drying bedclothes thrown over the top.
There was little by the way of furniture. A table and chair by the window. A couple of old rugs on the bare wooden floor, Persian by the looks of them, but worn to threads. Two old leather chairs stood at the centre of the room; a carved box between them acted as a table. A narrow iron bed, draped with an appliqued coverlet, occupied an alcove. A battered leather satchel and a travel-stained loden coat hung on a hook on the back of the door. The ceramic stove in the corner had not been lit.
‘You may find it rather cold.’ Elisabeth was wearing a thick knitted Norwegian jacket over layers of clothing but still managed to look elegant. ‘I’m used to it.’ She pulled the collar closer, as if she felt the cold despite what she said. ‘This is my cousin Lena’s house. I came with so little. What I stood up in, what I could carry in that bag. She’s been kind enough to take us in. The bed is from one of the maids’ rooms in the attic. At least I have a bed.’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘They are sleeping on straw mattresses up there, five, six to a room.’ She looked about. ‘I’d offer you something, but …’
‘I’ve brought things!’ Edith dived into her briefcase and took out tea, coffee, sugar, bars of chocolate and packets of rich tea and digestive biscuits to lay before her. ‘It’s all I could pack in, I’m afraid.’
‘Real coffee! It’s enough! Lena will be overjoyed!’
She came back with a tray of coffee and biscuits arranged on a fine china plate.
Edith nibbled at a biscuit out of politeness. She offered Elisabeth a packet of cigarettes, placing it on the table between them.
Elisabeth took one. ‘Such luxury to smoke them. And so good to speak English after all this time! I fear I’ve grown a little rusty.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘You won’t join me?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Asthma!’ Elisabeth’s face lit up at the memory. ‘You mentioned it that first evening when we drank all that brandy on the terrace.’
‘You were drinking brandy.’ Edith smiled, caught in the web of shared recollection. It had been a magical evening. ‘I was drinking schnapps.’
‘Williams Pear, I recall,’ Elisabeth gave a faint echo of the sudden ringing peal that Edith remembered. She had always felt absurdly rewarded when she made Elisabeth laugh.
They were silent for a moment, netted in a memory that telescoped time, bringing them back to the late-evening gloaming of that last, lost summer.
The light died from Elisabeth’s eyes as quickly as it had been ignited.
‘I can’t believe I will never go back there again. I wake up in the morning thinking I’m there, only to realize … It is the same every day. A purgatory that I will never escape.’ When she turned to Edith, her smile was tired, automatic. ‘You are here with the Control Commission?’
‘Yes.’ Edith looked down at her uniform. ‘Education Division. I was a teacher, if you remember.’
‘Of course. Remembering is all there is for me to do.’ She extinguished one cigarette and lit another. ‘I’ve lost everything. House, land, position, family. My people. All those I knew and loved. Our place. Our way of life. All gone. We’d been there for seven hundred years. Now, I have nothing.’ She paused. ‘The people called the moment of our defeat Die Stunde Null: Hour Zero. I feel I’m there still, as though life is over, or has not begun. Towards the end, people began committing suicide, whole families of them. It was very common. Not through love for the Führer but because they knew that their time, everything they held familiar, was finished.’
Elisabeth sat very upright and still for quite a time, her blue eyes dark, magnified by tears she refused to spill. Of regret? Loss? Bitterness? Edith didn’t know and couldn’t ask her. Do tears have to be defined? And to cry before another went against her upbringing, her caste. When they’d first met, Edith had been dazzled and fascinated in equal measure. Now, she saw the woman behind the aura that her title, position, wealth and privilege had given her and was deeply moved by her but she knew better than to go to her, to touch her. Elisabeth would despise any gesture with the slightest tincture of pity. She was not the kind of woman to fall into another’s arms.
But Elisabeth was still Elisabeth. There might be holes in her stockings and the knitted jacket might be worn at the elbows but it was Setesdale and the loden on the door was fur lined. Edith felt a frisson of the feeling that she’d had on first coming to Schloss Steinhof. A touch of the same social awkwardness. She looked down at her uniform, the cigarettes and packets of biscuits on the table, such shows of largesse and British authority might seem very like boasting.
‘Did you feel tempted?’ she asked at last. ‘To end it all, I mean.’
‘What?’ Elisabeth turned as though she’d forgotten that there was anyone else in the room. ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.’ Her laugh was ironic, bitter. ‘Although I sometimes wish I had. No,’ she repeated quietly. ‘I didn’t do that. I had to survive. For my daughter.’
‘You have a daughter?’ Edith looked around in absolute surprise, as if she might be hiding somewhere.
‘Elfriede – Elfi. Would you like to see her?’
‘Yes,’ Edith was at a loss. She had not expected this. ‘Of course.’
Elisabeth rapped on the partition. ‘Lise? Can you bring Elfriede in to me?’
A girl sidled into the room, shy, her eyes cast down. She held a baby in the crook of her arm. A little dark head showed over the edge of the enveloping shawl. Edith didn’t know much about babies but this one looked very young.
‘Why,’ she said as she moved closer. ‘She’s tiny!’
‘She was born in the summer.’
‘So you were pregnant when you left?’
‘Yes, or she would never have survived. It was cold on the journey here. 20 degrees below zero, more. Infants died in nappies frozen to solid blocks of ice. Inside me was the safest place.’ She stated that as an everyday fact, as if it was something people knew. People like her. Germans. Edith sensed the gap between them, the conquerers and the conquered. ‘I was sick after she was born, very sick,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t feed her or look after. Lise took over. She had just lost a baby.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Edith said to the girl in German.
‘It was war, Edith.’ Elisabeth spoke for Lise. ‘You have no idea how hard it was. Lise became pregnant because a Russian soldier raped her. It is probably good the child is dead.’
The baby woke, stirring in Lise’s arms. Edith approached carefully.
‘May I see?’
Lise lowered the edge of the shawl. The baby yawned showing two tiny teeth. Edith leaned closer. The yawn widened into a smile and her eyes opened wide.
‘What a dear little thing! Such big, brown eyes.’
Edith looked up. Elisabeth was blue eyed, so was Kurt. This child had dark hair and dark eyes.
‘She’s not Kurt’s,’ Elisabeth said. ‘If that’s the question you were wanting to ask. Thank you, Lise, you may take her away now,’ she said in German, dismissing the girl. She turned back to Edith. ‘It’s a long story. There’s so much to tell.’
She put her hands together, almost in an attitude of prayer, and began her story.
We’d been planning to go for months. We were under no illusion as to what would happen if we stayed. The Eastern Front was collapsing. Refugees had been pouring west since summer, set in motion like herds that smell fire on the wind. By the Autumn, the Nazis circulated what the Russian had done at Nemmersdorf. Children slaughtered, women, old, young, raped and murdered, their bodies dumped on dung heaps, nailed to barn doors. We assumed that it was the usual lies, propaganda, faked somehow; we didn’t believe anything we were told anymore. Then refugees began to come in from the Goldap and Gumbinnen. It was all true. That was what we could expect.
We prepared in secret. Right to the last, the Nazis kept saying that the Russians would be defeated by some miracle weapon, that an army would appear from nowhere. It was a matter of will. Anyone the slightest bit ‘defeatist’ would be hanged. Every man, able bodied or not, old men and young boys scarcely more than children, were made to join the Volkssturm. And they were taking horses – I could not allow that. I would not let the army take them or leave them for those Russian savages to work to death or slaughter for meat. I had to save as many as possible. I had to preserve the breed. The old men and the boys saddled up with Kaspar, my Master of Horse, and drove the herd west. Organizing my people was not so easy. Some were reluctant. They had lived there for countless generations. Others were afraid. Then, from one day to the next, everything changed. On January 21st there was an order to evacuate the area. I rode to town to find that the Nazis had already left, party offices empty, files discarded, burnt papers blowing like black snow.
It was time. I sent word to be ready. We would leave that night. I ordered everyone to take the bare minimum. Most came laden but how could I blame them? When you pack your life onto the back of a cart, what do you leave? What do you take? The choices are too difficult to make. I restricted myself to the barest of necessities: change of clothing, a few photos, family papers, toiletries, bandages, valuables that were easily carried, pistol, rifle, shotgun, ammunition.
That last evening, we had a feast. We ate boar and drank Margaux, chateau-bottled Haut-Brion, Chateau d’Yquem – all the great vintages from my father’s cellar. There was no point in keeping them now. When the time came, my mother ordered us to leave her. Brice stayed, he’d served the family from a young boy and was devoted to die alte Gräfin. Now they are together forever. My mother had a grave dug in the cellar for when the time came. Brice to do the honours with my father’s service pistol. I assume there was room for him, too. We left the keys on the hall table, closed the great doors and left them inside. Entombed. Sometimes I wished I’d gone down with her to the cellar, to be interred there. Never to leave.
I saddled my chestnut mare, Andreas rode the bay stallion, so we would have a breeding pair wherever we finally fetched up. We set off in a convoy, the majority in carts and wagons pulled by horses. Tractors were useless. Even if there was fuel to be had, it would freeze.
It was bitterly cold, the horses slipping on the icy roads. We were not the only ones on the move. They were coming in from every side. It took hours to get to the nearest town, more hours to get through it. The road west was clogged with wagons, tractors, handcarts, prams, people pulling suitcases on planks of wood. A solid column of misery extended in both directions as far as the eye could see, all going at the pace of the slowest with frequent stoppages for broken axles, collapsed horses, troops moving in the opposite direction. How long did it go on like this? For hundreds of miles, a thousand? By nightfall we had hardly moved. Some of my people decided to turn back, take their chances with the Russians. I don’t blame them. They thought that they could carry on as they had done before but under new masters. Irenka was one of them and her daughter, she wouldn’t leave her old mother, who was really too frail to survive the long journey. Our lands are in Poland now. For them it was a journey postponed and who knows what they suffered when the conquerors swept through.
To go on, go back, or strike north for the sea? No one knew what to do. Danzig was still open but for how long? The only way to it was across the frozen Haff but at least the ships were still evacuating refugees. That way was not for us. The ships would never take the horses and it had its own perils. On the ice, there was no cover. Columns were strafed, dive-bombed by the Russians. The ice stained red. Horses and wagons fell through the broken ice, whole families lost. Even for those who reached the port and got a passage out, it was hardly salvation. The ships were easy pickings for Russian torpedoes.
We rode west, cutting across country, using back roads. Andreas leading, the rest strung out behind like a line of cavalry. We had maps but the weather was against us with freezing temperatures and strong winds blowing the snow so the horses sank up to their bellies in drifts. Across the fields, we could see the dark figures moving like a column of ghosts through the white veiling snow, always at the same slow pace, like a scene from history, from the Thirty Years’ War, maybe. We were forced back onto the highway. We began to see bodies at the sides of the road. Mostly the old, but also the very young. Children. No one could stop to bury them. The ground was hard as stones. They were just left by the wayside for animals to find. After the first shock, we barely gave these huddled forms a second glance. Like everyone else, we were intent on our own survival, finding food for ourselves and the horses, shelter for the night, some warmth. We were well armed. A horse was worth a fortune but ours were beyond price.
We went across country if we could, trying to avoid the roaming, clashing armies. We knew where the armies had passed. We learnt to avoid the villages where crows robed the trees. We rode west, always west, into the setting sun. When we reached Pomerania, the people were living in the same state of uncertainty that we had endured, told that they were safe, that the Russians would never reach them, that one last heroic campaign would save them. None of them believed it for a minute, but they had been ordered not to leave. Every town, every village, still had its zealots.
By the time we reached Stettin, we could see the flash of artillery, hear gunfire, the hideous whine of Stalinorgel rockets streaking up in quick succession. The Russians were near. We struck north, across the frozen Boddengewässer to Usedom. From there we went west, heading for my cousin’s estate outside Schwerin but when we got there, we discovered that she had moved to Lübeck, thinking it might be safer in the city. The Russians were over the Oder and no one knew where they would stop. When I found the great door locked, the house all shut up, I confess, I sat on the steps and wept. We got to our feet again to travel to Lübeck. But now I see her leaving, forcing us onwards, as a stroke of fortune. Schwerin is in the Russian Zone and here we are in the British Zone. The Russians were so intent on taking Berlin that the British reached here before they could. For that I am forever grateful.
Elisabeth leaned back in her chair, exhausted by her long telling. At first, Edith had wanted to ask questions: what had happened to the aged aunts, for example? But her questions lay scattered by the epic sweep of Elisabeth’s story. Leo had been right when he’d said she would stay in her corner of Prussia, looking after her estates and her people, distant in every way from the Nazi regime. What greater proof could there be than this? What Elisabeth had done was heroic in the word’s oldest, truest meaning. True to herself and her caste, she’d shown all the aristocratic virtues: courage, honour, obligation and responsibility, the other side of the golden coin of rank and privilege.
‘What do you want from me, Edith?’
‘I – I’m not sure what you mean …’ Edith asked, shocked at this abrupt transition.
Elisabeth lit another cigarette. ‘That boy, the Polish one.’
‘Luka?’
‘That’s him. He’s smart. All the kids here love him. He’s a hero to them.’ She stood up and began pacing. ‘He holds you in high regard but he’s a survivor, no moral sense whatsoever, and he’s given to boasting.’ She turned to Edith. ‘He said you’d been looking all over Lübeck but he was the one who’d found me.’ She stopped her pacing and looked down at Edith. ‘I knew someone was looking. The girl who works in your billet, Magda, told me that someone from the Control Commission had been asking questions. At first, I was alarmed, but when she said it was a woman and gave a description, I knew it was you.’
‘Why didn’t you make contact? Send a message. Something …’
Elisabeth shrugged. ‘I didn’t know why you were searching. It doesn’t do to draw attention, to be noticed. It was so under the Nazis and it’s not very different now. You don’t understand. We are your playthings. You can do what you want with us. Like that odious little man with his truck and his soldiers. You have all the power.’ She turned, looking down at Edith. ‘So, why were you searching?’
‘I was concerned. I wanted to know what had happened to you.’ Edith spread her open hands towards Elisabeth. ‘I thought you might be here, so many are from East Prussia. I knew you had a cousin who lived near, so there might be a chance …’
‘I see,’ Elisabeth looked off towards the window, hand cupped under her elbow, cigarette poised. ‘Is it me you want. Or Kurt?’
‘Kurt?’
‘You have not asked about him.’
‘So much has happened. There’s been so much to say.’ Edith found herself prevaricating. ‘So much catching up to do.’
She was aware how weak that sounded. Elisabeth was clever. Intuitive. Much sharper than Kurt. She had the brains. She was seeing another side of Elisabeth now.
‘So much that you do not ask about your former lover?’ Elisabeth’s eyed narrowed. ‘The British are looking for him, aren’t they?’
‘They well might be,’ Edith said vaguely.
‘Oh, come on, Edith. You know they are. You’ve probably been sent to find out what you can. Isn’t that the truth of it?’
Edith had no answer. Elisabeth had seen through.
‘Well, yes.’ She sighed. ‘I won’t deny it …’ She paused to find what to say. ‘But it’s not all about finding Kurt. That’s what Leo wants but I – I wanted to find you, too. To know that you were alive, that you’d survived.’
‘The reason doesn’t matter,’ Elisabeth gave one of her rare smiles. ‘I felt the same gladness at seeing you.’ She stubbed her cigarette out and lit another. ‘And I’m looking for Kurt, too. You do not ask what happened to Wolfgang, either. So, I will tell you.’