Papa’s leather suitcase was unremarkable, held together by a brass buckle at the end of a strap. It lay open on the bed. Anna looked down at her folded belongings: a cotton nightgown tucked between three frocks, an olive-green cardigan, a woollen skirt and her good silk blouse. Such scant cargo for a journey across vast oceans. She gazed up at the pale sky beyond the trees; the winter had been bleak, with no real sunlight since November. Maybe others saw silvery sunshine and soft falls of dusk, but for Anna the days slid from dimness into darkness and back again. Sometimes when she woke it was hard to tell whether it was morning or still night.
It would be hot where she was going. How to prepare for a climate she knew nothing about? A world so far away. But clothes were not her real concern. The most precious cargo was her collection of small costume dolls she couldn’t bring herself to leave behind. She had fashioned a safe compartment for them, each one housed in a tiny roll of material, then tightly wrapped in underwear or socks. The Dutch doll proved the hardest to pack, the wings of her white hat poking holes through Anna’s fine wool stockings. The wooden clogs kept falling off the doll’s tiny feet, so Anna ended up gluing them on so they wouldn’t get lost. She locked the suitcase and slid it back under her bed. The train would leave that day at 8 a.m. She whispered the instructions to herself like a kind of mantra.
She had walked five miles through the viscous grey chill of dawn, clutching her suitcase, to visit the man her papa called Shmontz. He was so small you could almost mistake him for a child, were it not for the feathery tuft on his chin – not the sort of person she imagined would work clandestinely for the Resistance. She had watched him as he examined the envelope of papers Papa had prepared. The man flicked aside a streak of blond hair that kept falling across his forehead. His left eye was black. It was rumoured that his vision had been destroyed because of constant exposure to chemicals as a young apprentice working in a clothes-dyeing shop. The damaged eye kept lolling disconcertingly outward, blindly staring down at the stacks of books that surrounded him. He held a magnifying glass up to his good eye as he examined the documents. Despite his youth, Shmontz already had a discreet reputation beyond the Jewish community as the master of erasure, disappearing real identities to carve out plausible new ones.
‘Will you be able to help me vanish in time?’ She clutched the bag to her chest, her foot tapping out a nervous rhythm.
The young man sized her up with a prickly gaze. ‘Small fictions can’t be rushed.’ He placed the magnifying glass back down on the desk.
‘If we don’t move quickly, they will find me.’ Anna was trying to be careful not to aggravate him. She knew her fate hung on every detail he inscribed onto one of the blank identity cards he pulled from a drawer.
The room was filled with junk, the flotsam and jetsam of his unknowable life. A naked mannequin stood behind him. It bore the anonymity Anna was desperately seeking. On the desk lay a pile of rubber stamps, inks of various colours, an old typewriter and a jar filled with pens. A grey-and-white cat sat on a cushion beside him, licking its paws.
‘I am very grateful to you,’ Anna added, handing over the money Papa had instructed her to give Shmontz. In return, he would provide her with the papers that would allow Anna Müller to cease to exist. It was a risk she had no choice but to take.
A faint smile came across his face as he focused on the documents. He placed them back in the envelope which he flicked into her palm, as though he were performing some magic trick.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s my job to change someone’s life in einem Augenblick.’
In the blink of an eye, she had become Anna Winter.