Chapter 10 Audrey

BERLIN, GERMANY | DECEMBER 1938

It was a frigid Tuesday morning, and Audrey was struggling with the Christmas tree.

Though it was only days before Christmas Eve, Vogt had insisted upon having one. He’d ordered a junior officer to drag it home behind him the previous night after work, leaving Audrey to sweep up the needles they trailed through the house.

She was now affixing two dozen small candles to the branches, thinking of Ira and Ruth. She had discovered a box of Hanukkah decorations in the cellar one evening when she was fetching wine for the men. She’d nearly wept at the sight, knowing where each object belonged: the grand silver menorah in pride of place on the sitting room windowsill, where it grew cold to the touch from the chilly draft. The blue spun glass bowls filled with multicoloured boiled sweets adorning the mantel. She ached to bring one of the smaller menorahs to Ilse, but knew she couldn’t risk being discovered with it, and Ilse couldn’t use candles in the attic in case their captors smelled the smoke.

Audrey had written her father again, but there was still no word from him. All she could do was wait, keep Ilse alive and hidden, and hope for some way out of Berlin. Since Müller’s gentle interrogation a few weeks before, Audrey was even more careful to maintain her character, lest his veiled accusations of her deepen. He hadn’t mentioned the irregularities he’d observed again, and she hoped she’d sufficiently deflected his attention onto Vogt’s behaviour.

Audrey brushed an errant spray of pine needles off the honey-coloured wood of the piano and thought of the recital and graduation she’d missed on the fifteenth. At this point, she was meant to be on a train to London to spend Christmas with her father, which would have likely involved a heated discussion about his goals for her—marriage—and her dreams—an artistic career. For months, she’d dreaded the prospect of leaving Ilse. Now she would give almost anything to be in London, so long as Ilse was with her.

All she could do now was keep on keeping on, and so she wrestled the finicky candles onto the tree, though it seemed strange to be celebrating anything at all right now. Christmas was a time of family, friends. Warmth and hope in dark times. But their current circumstances were painfully lacking in that regard. It felt as though her world itself were on fire, and here she was, acting the fool, lighting candles to augment an already scorching blaze.

The propaganda splashed over the covers of the cold newspapers she collected from the porch every morning made it clear Hitler was preparing for war. And from what she’d overheard during the poker nights, he planned to invade Bohemia and Moravia in the coming months, expanding Germany’s reach into Czechoslovakia.

The metallic clink of the mail slot interrupted her thoughts. The morning post. With one last look at the tree, she rose and wandered to the telephone room, flicked on the small desk lamp. There were two pieces of mail. One was for Müller, evidently from some relative named Gisela.

The other was from her own aunt Minna.

After weeks of waiting for her father to respond to either of her letters, why was there a letter from Minna?

She tore it open.

1 December, ’38

Dear Audrey,

It is with a heavy heart that I must relay news of your father’s passing.

Audrey gasped, and tears sprang to her eyes.

He died suddenly on 26 November of a stroke. The Dr (or coroner? I do not know) told me he could not have suffered long, if at all. That has brought me some measure of comfort, and I hope it will for you too. We buried him today in the family plot in Brompton.

I know it was his wish that you return home after your graduation, and you must now sort out your inheritance, the sale of the home, etc. His solicitor is Wm. Bailey in Lombard St—you must contact him to make the necessary arrangements. Your dowry remains available for your marriage, and you would honour your father by coming home and securing a strong match. I am headed back to Alnwick tomorrow—your letters can find me there.

I expect I shall see you soon, and that we might share our grief together. It pains me to lose him so soon after my own dear Alfred. I am sorry, dear.

Affectionately,

Aunt M.

Audrey read the letter over and over, willing her aunt’s words to change, but the terrible truth was there in black and white. She needed Ilse. Letter in hand, she fled upstairs.

When Ilse saw Audrey’s tear-stricken face appear in the access, she scampered down the ladder. “What is it?”

Audrey couldn’t speak. She just held out the letter.

“From your father?” Ilse said.

“No,” Audrey managed.

Brow furrowed, Ilse took the paper, then her face crumpled. “Oh, no. Audrey.” She held out her arms and Audrey curled into them, sobbing. They sank to the floor, but Ilse didn’t let her go. She just held her as Audrey cried out her grief as quietly as possible. Even though the men were out and they had locked Ilse’s bedroom door, she still felt the need to muffle her cries, as though the very walls might hear and betray them.

She was fighting an internal battle now, grappling with the questions in the dark arena of her mind, that place a bereaved soul descends to in the aftermath of tragedy. What if she had been there with him when the stroke hit? Would he have stood a chance, if she’d been able to send for a doctor straightaway? Had he known what was happening? Had he died alone?

“I’m so sorry,” Ilse murmured, stroking Audrey’s hair. “I never thought the loss of our fathers would be a tragedy we shared so soon.”

Audrey closed her eyes against Ilse’s soothing touch.

She thought about how her father had been happier after they returned to London. The distance from Berlin had helped him leave some of his heartbreak behind, and he made a little space for Audrey in his life.

Growing up, Audrey had never had a birthday celebration because it was also the anniversary of her mother’s death. It was as though the two events somehow cancelled one another out in the great cosmic scoreboard. The James family let every August third pass by in silence whilst they stared at it, like some beast that might attack at the smallest sound.

But on her sixteenth birthday, her father had come home from work and found her at the bench of their black baby grand, playing Debussy’s Reverie. She heard the creak of the door, the thunk of the lock, but kept playing. Victor had walked silently into the room and sat behind her in his favourite green club chair with the brass studs, and listened. When she finished, she’d turned to face him with a small smile and was shocked to see that he was struggling to hold back tears.

“She would have been very proud of you,” he said.

It was the only time in her life that Audrey’s father had ever made any reference to her mother’s existence. She wished she could go back to that moment, wrap her arms around him, and tell him she was sorry for the pain in his soul.

“What are you going to do now?” Ilse asked gently, pulling Audrey from the past.

“What do you mean?”

“Well…” Ilse wavered. “You’ll need to leave, won’t you? Go home to settle things, like your aunt said?”

Audrey sat up. “Don’t even speak of me leaving, Ilse. Of course I’m going to stay.”

She had hoped that if her father came up with a way to get them to England, she still might have been able to convince Ilse to come with her, despite the unknown fates of her mother and brother. But that door was closed to them now. Minna didn’t have the connections her father did, or the resourcefulness.

Come what may, they were entirely trapped in Berlin. Trapped with Müller and Vogt.

The sliver of light in the dark—the thread Audrey clung to in her grief—was Ilse.

“I can’t go back to London. This is my home,” she said. “Here. With you. It always has been.”