Father had a room on the ground floor of the Torhaus – a kind of bedroom-cum-study. There was a small cottage piano with a walnut veneer with elaborate figuring and a candleholder alongside the music stand.
‘Where did the piano come from?’ he said.
Fräulein Frank, who was thin and cold-eyed, and had wide bony shoulders like a coat hanger, said, ‘From a place where it’s no longer needed.’
‘Brax caused it to be brought here?’
‘He gave the order.’ Something approaching reverence showed in the cold eyes at the mention of Brax.
‘It needs tuning,’ said Father, disapprovingly, having tried a few bars of Chopin. ‘Particularly if it’s been moved—’
‘You must do your best with it as it is,’ said Elsa Frank, and Father frowned, then shrugged as if in acceptance.
‘Brax wants me to write music while we’re here,’ he said to Christa after they had been given supper. ‘I think he sees himself as a kind of patron of the arts. He says he’s saving the artists from the Nazis.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘I don’t have much choice. He wants a particular piece of music – something military as far as I can make out. He’s quite – insistent about it. I shall have to make the attempt, I think. And he did get us out of Lindschoen – I mustn’t lose sight of that.’
Christa’s mind went back to the night in The Music House, to the overheard conversation. It had sounded as if composing music for Brax was to be a kind of payment for him getting them out of Lindschoen after Reinhardt’s death. It was a curious way to settle a debt, but these were strange times.
Father was saying, ‘The trouble is, Christa, that I’m not much of a composer – I haven’t the originality.’
Christa thought they both knew this was true, although she would not have said it for worlds. Father was a very good musician indeed, but the few pieces he had written were a bit boring. It was disloyal to think this, but it was still true.
It was slightly alarming to find that Fräulein Frank locked all the doors that night, and that they were not able to go outside.
‘There will be no need,’ she said when Father questioned her. ‘You have everything here you need. There will be books and school things for the girl—’
Christa retorted coldly, ‘I’m not a child. My schooldays are behind me. I’ll be helping my father with his music, and perhaps sketch and explore the countryside—’
‘You will not explore the countryside,’ said Fräulein Frank. ‘You won’t go beyond the gardens of the house. The gates will be locked, and you will find the wall is too high to climb.’
Father said, very politely, ‘I don’t think we realized this would be a prison.’
‘It isn’t a prison. It isn’t to keep you in, it’s to keep the world out – to hide you from it.’
‘For the time being,’ said Father.
‘Yes. And my cousin has gone to considerable trouble to bring you both here. His work is vital and he is inspirational.’ Again there was the change of tone. ‘You must not disappoint him.’
It was not exactly captivity, but Christa thought it nearly was. However, as Father said, it would not be for very long, and he would have the musical project to absorb him. It might be that Christa could help with that. As for Stefan, Brax had promised to bring regular news of him, and Elsa Frank said Brax came regularly to the house. In any case, they would soon be back in Lindschoen and life would resume its normal course. Christa knew life would probably never resume its normal course, but this could not be said.
Mother’s faithlessness could not be mentioned either, of course, but Christa would never forgive her for putting the bleak despair into Father’s eyes for ever, and for leaving Stefan bewildered and uncomprehending. I hate you, said Christa to the memory of the woman she no longer thought of as Mother, only as Giselle. I hate you and I’m glad your lover died in agony. She did not dare frame the thought that it could only have been Father who had killed Obersturmbannführer Reinhardt. She was horrified to realize she did not care that he had.
There were three other people at the Torhaus; Christa supposed they, too, had been brought here for safety by Brax, although she did not like to ask them, or at least not until she had got to know them better. One was a painter who smiled vaguely and had paint stains all over his hands, and one was a writer who spent his time shut away in a small room at the house’s rear and who was very secretive about whatever he was writing, and seemed very angry about everything. The other was a silversmith, who had a kind of workroom adjoining the house.
Unexpectedly, life inside the Torhaus had its own routine. Meals were taken with the writer and the painter, and with Jacob the silversmith. There was a girl who came and went, and who scrubbed floors and helped with the cooking, but it seemed to be expected that Christa would help with that as well. She did not mind, because she had usually cooked for Father and Stefan at home after Mother went. She tried to talk to Elsa Frank, but met only a cold response.
Sometimes Christa heard piano music coming from her father’s room. It was not anything she recognized, so it seemed that he had begun work on the composition for Brax. Father had said Brax wanted something military, but this did not sound particularly military. It sounded flat and dull, as if Father had simply cobbled together bits of other people’s music. Christa did not think it was in the least what Brax wanted.
Jacob turned out to be a nephew of Herr Eisler. ‘So I know your father’s work,’ he said to Christa. ‘All my family admire him very much and I’m very pleased indeed to meet him. He will compose something fine while he’s here.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think I can,’ said Father, when Christa reported this. ‘And apart from anything else, that piano is so out of tune that anything I play sounds like nails rattling, and even if it sounded like a Bechstein, I’m no composer.’
‘How bad is the piano?’
‘Come and try it for yourself.’
The piano was fully as bad as he had said. Christa tried a scale and then the opening of Humoresque. The keys twanged with painful discordance. ‘It’s as if the hammers aren’t striking properly,’ she said. ‘I suppose the wires are all intact? Could we look inside?’
‘Could we? How could we?’
‘I don’t know, but – oh, wait, the lid’s hinged,’ said Christa. ‘Can we lift it? It might be stuck though, because it’s probably been closed up for years.’
But the piano’s lid lifted smoothly and easily, and they folded it back against the wall. Father reached up to the wall sconce to tilt it slightly so that the light shone straight into the piano’s innards.
‘The wires look all right,’ he said. ‘At least – they look more or less as the one at home looks when the tuner comes in.’
Then Christa, peering into the depths with him, said, ‘There’s something in there. Papers … They’re wedged against the wires – that’s what’s stopping the hammers striking properly.’
‘For heaven’s sake be careful.’
But Christa had already reached into the piano, and pulled the thin sheaf of papers free.
‘Music,’ she said, spreading it out on the small side table. ‘Handwritten.’
Across the top of the first sheet, handwritten, was a single word. Siegreich.
‘Victory,’ said Father, softly, then he drew in his breath sharply. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing, but Christa had already seen the tiny sketched outline at the foot of the page. The musical symbol called the ghost note. The small private signature her mother had always left on letters and note. ‘Because I’ll always be around like a ghost,’ she used to say. ‘Even though you mightn’t hear me, I’ll be there.’
It seemed to Christa as if the two of them talked for most of the night. Several times she thought someone walked across the hall outside the room, and each time she tensed, expecting Brax or Elsa Frank to come in, but they did not.
‘Only your mother would have added that note,’ said Father, hope shining in his eyes. ‘And that means she must have been here or somewhere nearby. It might mean she didn’t leave us voluntarily.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Christa, as he looked up suddenly, clearly realizing what he had said. ‘I heard what Brax said about – um – about her having run away with that man. The one who was killed.’
‘Reinhardt,’ said Father. ‘I never wholly believed that letter, but it was her writing, so I didn’t dare hope too much that it wasn’t true. But seeing this, I do hope it. I think she was forced to write that letter telling me she had run away with a lover. What I don’t know is why she was forced to do such a thing.’
‘Do you really think the letter was a lie?’ said Christa, eagerly.
Father smiled. He said, ‘At the foot of that letter she had drawn the ghost note. That’s what gave me that tiny strand of hope. And now there’s this.’ He tapped the music, his fingers lingering on it, as if even by touching it he felt a link to Christa’s mother.
Christa felt tears well up, but she fought them down. ‘Is it possible Mother could have actually written this music?’ I’m thinking of her as ‘Mother’ again, she thought with relief.
Father was studying the music again. ‘I never knew her to compose anything,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean she never did, though. But as to where she is now …’
He broke off, and Christa glanced towards the window, to the rearing iron gates and the brick chimneys of Sachsenhausen in the distance. A shiver of apprehension scudded across her.
Then Father said, in a determinedly optimistic voice, ‘You know, Brax can’t have known this music was in here. Tomorrow, I’ll try it out, and if it’s any good— Christa, supposing I copied it onto clean score sheets? That I let Brax believe I’ve written it as the music he wants from me?’
‘Dare you do that?’
‘Yes, I do dare,’ he said.
After their first week at the Torhaus, Jacob gave Christa the most beautiful silver bracelet, made up of smooth links of thin, satiny discs and loops.
‘It’s lovely.’ Christa was delighted. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, clasping the bracelet around her wrist with pleasure.
‘I enjoyed making it for you. A beautiful object for a beautiful lady.’
‘Oh, God, what a cliché,’ said the writer from his corner, and banged out of the room to go back to his room and write his angry prose.
‘It’s not so much a cliché as all that,’ said the painter, who was lounging on a window-seat, sketching the view beyond the window. His eyes flickered with something Christa could not understand, then he said, ‘Christa, can I paint you sometime? Or even just sketch you? Quite soon, I mean.’
‘I didn’t think I was particularly paintable,’ said Christa, trying not to sound pleased. ‘I’m not very pretty.’
‘You’re better than pretty,’ said the painter. ‘It’s something about your bones. Jacob, I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jacob, smiling.
Christa hoped she was not blushing. She said, ‘Um, well, all right, if you really want to.’
If it had not been for the gnawing anxiety about Stefan, and the perpetually locked gates in the high old wall, life inside the Torhaus might almost have been friendly.
Occasionally, late at night, Christa stole downstairs to curl up on the small chair immediately outside Father’s room, and listen to him playing the music by the unknown composer. It felt like a link to Mother because of the ghost note. The music itself was lovely, it was strong and stirring and rich, even played on the tinny old piano in this sad, dark house. It was music to keep in your mind to give you strength if bad things happened to you.
Jacob sometimes brought pieces of jewellery for Christa to see, or asked her to help him with some small process in his little workshop. This she found very interesting. Christa wanted to ask Jacob why he was here – whether he had been in danger from the Nazis – but she did not want to appear to be prying, particularly when he was so friendly and nice. They talked about his uncle, dear flamboyant Herr Eisler, who had played at so many of Father’s concerts. Jacob said his uncle had been a marvellous influence in his life.
The writer was not friendly towards anyone. He did not always appear at meals, and he was abrupt with everyone and sometimes called Elsa Frank shocking names. The painter told Christa writers were often bad-tempered, and not to take any notice. He arranged for Christa to go up to his studio at the top of the house for an hour each morning. Christa was pleased, because it filled up some of the day, although she sometimes got cramp from keeping still in one position for so long.
But then came the day when everything changed.
Christa had gone up to the painter’s studio at their usual time. As she went up the stairs, he came into the hall below and called up to her to go along to his room; he would be there in a minute, and they would continue with the sketch he had started yesterday.
Climbing the stairs to the studio, Christa was feeling almost happy. Yesterday Brax had come to the Torhaus – Elsa Frank had flown into a flurry of cooking and house-cleaning because of it. Ben, the writer, said it was revolting to see such slavish adoration; the woman might as well put down a prayer mat and make obeisance and he would not come in to the communal supper that evening.
Brax had brought Father and Christa a letter from Velda, which included a carefully written note from Stefan, telling about things at school, and sending lots of love. He sounded happy and normal, and it had been a huge relief to read it. Velda’s letter contained no news about the SS finding Reinhardt’s body or of any enquiry being made in the town about his murder, and, as Father said, Velda was the most gossipy person you could meet, and she would certainly have written about that. We’re going to be safe, thought Christa. Father’s transcribing that music for Brax, and Brax will think it’s Father’s own work and be pleased, and everything will be all right. And soon we’ll be able to go home.
The painter’s room was littered with easels and canvases, and painting things were strewn around, but Christa liked the feeling of stepping into a slightly bohemian world. Here was the makeshift dais he had set up, with the draped velvet curtain which was the backdrop he was using for her portrait. The velvet was rubbed and old, but the painter would make it look good. It had slipped down, though, and it would save time if Christa could get it back in place. She reached for the edges and lifted it to pin it back on to the wall. There was a small cabinet pushed into the corner, which the velvet had hidden, and which she had not realized was there. Probably it held brushes and palette knives and things.
Christa had certainly not intended to look at the drawer’s contents, but the top drawer was open, and in reaching up with the velvet, she could not help seeing the scatter of what looked like postcards in the drawer. It seemed vaguely odd that the painter should have postcards sent to him here.
There were six altogether, and they were larger than normal postcards. The colours were vivid – almost crude – and the images were dreadfully clear.
The first was obviously meant to portray a British soldier – the khaki uniform was unmistakable. He was lying on a bed with a female who was as near naked as made no difference, apart from a fold of the sheet here and there.
The caption across the top, said: ‘Is this what your husband is doing while you think he is fighting a war …?’
The next postcard showed a semi-nude, fair-haired female, lying seductively on a bed. She was wearing a British Army helmet, and looking into a full-length mirror. But the image that looked out of the mirror was different – it was of a dark-haired female, with the yellow Star of David across her front. And again, a besotted-looking British officer – this time in an RAF uniform – was kneeling at the foot of the bed. The caption was much the same as the first: ‘Your husband, your sweetheart, your brother, tell you they are fighting for your country – but this is what they are really doing …’
They were sickening in a number of ways, but the terrible thing was that in every single one, the face of the female posing so alluringly was Christa herself.
Christa gave a deep sob, and ran blindly out of the room and down the stairs. Arms grabbed her and held her, and Jacob Eisler said, ‘Christa, my poor love, what on earth’s happened?’