Frischer Apfelkuchen – apple cake fresh from the oven. She had never been much of a cook, although she envied women who were. In Birdum she had learned to prepare the basics, but the clientele was hardly a fussy lot. She remembered her mother’s recipe book, a culinary bible of neatly arranged perfect lines of script, one delicious dish to each page. Papa must have eventually packed it up and given it away, along with Mutti’s dresses, shoes and coats. And with that, Anna had lost her mother all over again. Looking back, she felt as though he had been trying to hide his wife’s very existence. The only piece of her clothing she had left was a strip torn from a red velvet scarf and knotted around Lalka’s waist. As a child Anna would dig her nose into the fabric to try and elicit the feeling of comfort that her mother’s scent brought back, holding onto an invisible thread between the worlds of the living and the dead.
There was a knock at the door. Even before she opened it, she could already feel Alter embracing her. She called from the hallway of her new house, where she lived alone now: ‘Coming!’
She glanced in the mirror to check her lipstick. Alter stood at the front door, looking down at his feet. He was already as good as her husband; they had been a couple for almost a year now and a moment didn’t go by where she didn’t think of their future together. She had felt this day coming for a while. They spent all their free time in each other’s company, and after the widow she had lived with died recently, he helped her move house, carrying furniture, books and boxes of dishes the family had kindly given her. The old lady had also left her a generous sum of money, which allowed Anna to rent her own place around the corner in Barkly Street.
Alter followed her into the dining room, where she had set the table – tea glasses, plum jam, sugar cubes, almonds, dried prunes, whipped cream.
‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’ll just be a minute.’
She scurried to the kitchen and cut several pieces of cake, placing them on a blue plate that she brought back to the table.
‘It’s my first apple cake,’ she said triumphantly. She felt her cheeks burn. ‘My mother used to make this, only I never had the recipe.’
Her chatter bubbled over into his silence as he sat bent over, stabbing his fork into the heart of a slice. Crumbs scattered as he brought a piece to his lips. Her words tied themselves into loops, forming a giant knot in her stomach. He slurped his tea and tugged at his collar. Each time he opened his mouth, she waited expectantly for him to say something. Instead, he filled it with more cake. She couldn’t bear it anymore. This shyness was so unlike him. He looked up at her for the first time since he had arrived.
She laughed. ‘My darling, you are sweating.’
He sat there not moving, his face sullen.
‘Let me make it easier for you.’
‘No, Anna – you don’t understand.’
‘Oh, Alter. Is this how a poet proposes? I imagined it would be more like a gentle whisper from the midst of some ancient forest, or a giant roar from the depths of the ocean. You are even too nervous to make it a flea bite.’ She laughed. ‘Let me spare us both the agony.’
She smiled, placing another slice of cake on his plate, but he pushed it away this time. He stirred his tea, the clink of the spoon on the rim of the glass filling the sudden silence between them. He looked pale.
‘What’s wrong, Alter? Are you feeling ill?’
‘No.’ He wiped his brow. ‘No.’
‘Would you like me to say it for you?’ She reached across the table, placing her hand on his. Her fingers searched for what she dreaded might already be lost. Like a prophet, she tried to divine the future from his palm, afraid she might find the line that designated a no-man’s-land of his love.
He pulled his hand away as though he had been bitten by a snake. ‘I really don’t know how to say this.’
‘I have something to tell you too, darling.’
He slid his chair back from the table and stood up, rubbing his throat as though he were trying to milk the words out. She had played out the scene of his proposal to her so many times in her head, but had never imagined he would have such stage fright. He walked across the room and stood facing the window, looking out onto the street. The bedroom door rested slightly ajar.
‘Tell me, how many other messages are you hiding?’ he asked quietly.
‘Pardon? What are you talking about, Alter?’
He walked over to a shelf, picked up one of the dolls and carried it over to the table. It lay there on the tablecloth, smiling blandly at the ceiling. It was one of Anna’s costume dolls – the Dutch girl.
‘Let’s see what’s in this one, shall we?’
‘I don’t —’
Before she could finish her sentence, he picked it up and tore off the head.
‘Alter!’ she screamed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘How could you deceive me all this time?’ he said angrily. He pulled out a small piece of paper from inside the doll’s head and tossed it in front of her. ‘There you have it. You have hoodwinked me all along – although was it betrayal when truth never really existed in the first place?’ He looked up at her, the blue of his eyes rimmed with red. ‘I’ve been such a fool. How did I not see it?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, but it’s so clear now, Anna. I accidentally dropped one of your dolls this week when I was helping you move. The Spanish one, to be precise. And as I was trying to piece it together, I found a note – just like the one I pulled out of your Dutch doll just now. And there was one inside the Russian doll, too.’
He was glaring at her. She scanned his eyes, trying to understand, thinking perhaps she had misheard.
Then he uttered one short sentence that murdered their love: ‘I would never have picked you for a Nazi.’
Words that burnt like fire. She had watched his mouth forming them, the tip of his tongue licking his cracked lips. A wave of nausea gripped her as she clutched her belly with one hand, grabbing the edge of the table with the other to steady herself. The tightly coiled silence grew between them. She looked away, falling into the chasm of purgatory that lay somewhere between her past and future. And with his words sank all her dreams – the sprawling marital bed, the desk on which he would write his poetry books, the pram she would wheel proudly around Carlton Gardens on weekends. Tears, laughter, arguments, dinners, desire, a family. Their family. She had lost the imagined life of ordinary people she had longed for. It had all vanished into the inky shadows in an instant.
She whispered his name. It was all she could offer in response – a question, a plea to explain, to erase what he had said, hoping he would smile and take her in his arms, saying it was all okay. But he stood there taciturn, his face shrouded with disgust.
‘You used the dolls.’
‘What are you talking about, Alter?’
‘Those delightful messages from your darling Führer. I found them.’ He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out two small pieces of paper. Unfolding one, he read out loud in German: ‘The largest threat to the Aryan is the Jew.’ He threw it on the table and read the other note: ‘If the Jew conquers the world this planet will again move through the ether, devoid of humanity.’
He lifted a small box from the pile in the hallway that Anna still hadn’t unpacked. Opening it up, he pulled out the collection of tiny costume dolls she had brought with her from Germany.
Alter tipped the rest of the costume dolls onto the table. They lay sprawled out like a pile of bodies, with their sumptuous costumes of toile and velvet, a theatre of drama attached to each one. He picked up the Bavarian doll and, with a tug, forced its head off too. Anna sat there, horrified, unable to move or speak. He held the doll out to her. ‘Look. Here is another one.’ He read it out loud: ‘With satanic lust, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting Aryan virgin, defiling her with his blood and stealing her from her Volk.’
With that, he picked up doll after doll and, like a triumphant executioner, tore off their heads, pulling out the yellowed notes from each one and throwing them onto the table. He ripped apart Egypt, Italy and Greece before destroying Uganda, New Zealand and Ecuador. He stood breathing heavily, clutching Scotland in his hand. Sparing the doll a similar fate, he lowered it back into the box.
‘Each of these notes bears an uncanny resemblance to Mein Kampf. And all signed by Herr Hitler himself. Now I understand clearly why you never wanted to talk to me of your past. I don’t know what the devil you were up to in Germany, but I sure as hell am not staying around to find out.’
‘But Alter. I had absolutely no idea those notes were there.’
‘You really expect me to believe that, Anna?’ He turned to her. ‘There’s nothing left to say. I don’t want you ever to come near me again.’ Picking up his hat, he made his way to the front door and, without looking back, walked out of her life.
She felt she might drown in her own disbelief. Humiliation, disappointment, shame – all words too bland to describe the hot blade that had pierced her chest, carving her heart into small pieces. How could she have mistaken this hideous accusation for a marriage proposal? Yet how was she to explain something she could not even begin to fathom herself? Where had all these despicable notes come from? The emptiness of it all grew larger and larger, filling the room. Her head spun. She didn’t understand. Had he tired of playing with her, like a morsel of prey tossed aside without even giving her a chance to defend herself? Drawing shallow breaths, she tried to stay afloat within the depths of panic and confusion.
Her wristwatch ticked away the moments that had passed since Alter closed the door quietly behind him and stepped out into the street. The notes lay on the table, spilling out from the dolls. The shadow of evening nibbled away at her, the day dissolving as she sat there shaking. His sudden departure had been a pathetic kind of violence. A knife would have been obvious, but his accusation had stabbed at the very soul of her being.
She should have seen it coming. How could she not have realised something was wrong? He had hardly uttered a word over the last few days. She felt the room might drop away, and with it the house, the wrought-iron gate, the footpath with its giant oak, the entire street – followed by St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Royal Exhibition Building and the Kadimah Library where Alter spent so many of his days working to set up a Yiddish school. A huge crater would be left where his words had fallen like a bomb. She envied the headless dolls lying there. Their pain had been sudden, unlike the deep ache she was left carrying. She wanted to die holding sweet memories, not unfulfilled dreams.
Her hand trembled as she picked up one of the crumpled, yellowed notes and tried to read the tiny black scrawl. She reached for a magnifying glass and had to squint to make out the words: ‘The Jew will stop at nothing. The devil himself takes on the living shape of the Jew. Lean years, but NSFM will soon rise again.’
NSFM – the National Socialist Freedom Movement – it was the name the banned Nazi party had re-formed under, after Hitler’s imprisonment in 1924. Her heart thrashed violently, stirring up the sediment of the past. Flashes of her childhood surfaced – Fraulein Schilling handing Papa a costume doll, Papa waiting outside in the car when Anna was taken to visit Hitler in Landsberg Prison, the professor whispering questions to Papa about the purity of Mutti’s family. She’d always had suspicions as a child, perhaps even knew deep down whom she might be surrounded by – but that she, Anna, could have been unwittingly drawn into this circle of evil back then? She began to glimpse what lay under the flimsy veil of childhood innocence.
It all became clear to her in an instant: the costume dolls had been used as a cover so the professor and his cronies could smuggle secret messages in and out of Landsberg Prison. After Hitler’s arrest and the temporary demise of his party back in 1923, they had to go underground and were secretly regrouping, united by their aim to regain power. And Anna had been their unwitting child courier, smuggling the dolls that contained snippets of Hitler’s vile manuscript out of the prison to be published. She was suddenly struck with a horrific thought. Had Papa known about this all along?
It made hideous sense now. How could she not have seen what was going on in front of her very eyes? But it was impossible to believe that her own sweet papa had been drawn willingly into this ghastly den of hatred and deception. Had this dear, loving man, who would do anything to protect her, truly been a Nazi? It would certainly explain a lot – Tantine’s secret visits, all those weekends spent at Professor Jäger’s house, Dr Magnussen’s hideous experiments on those poor rabbits hidden away in the garden shed, the notes Fraulein Schilling secretly pulled out of the costume dolls. But surely it was impossible. Papa had always tried to protect her, shielding her from everything. And he was the one who had organised false papers for her and helped her escape. Professor Jäger himself had said Papa was misguided. She ran to the bathroom and hurled what felt like her very being into the basin. A wave of cramps gripped her belly like a vice. She felt something trickle down her leg and looked down to see a rivulet of blood on the tiled floor. Both her future and past had been horrifically despoiled.
After Alter left, and she lost the baby, Anna started to vanish. Not so much disappear as gradually fade away. She sat in the corner of the loungeroom surrounded by half-empty coffee cups and abandoned doll limbs. The torment oozed from every pore, hollowing her out. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a photograph taken the day she and Alter met. Alter stood in front of the mail truck, grinning straight at the camera. Moments earlier, he had handed her the Box Brownie and run back to wedge himself between the Italian driver and his young Aboriginal guide. He smiled at her from across time, peering into the future through the camera lens, not knowing how powerfully his gaze would draw her in. She could still hear him call her name, but he stood beside her in memory only. Lalka watched from her place on the shelf.