Her parents’ apartment was now in the French sector of the occupied city. Méret and Tosca stayed in a house in the Russian sector on the far side of the Danube Canal.
Tosca kept her commissar’s uniform but had Méret kitted out in civvies—a two-piece in drab grey, but a good cut.
“We can go anywhere, it’s joint occupation, but, y’know, the city is patrolled constantly . . .”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t planning on wearing that uniform forever.”
“And the natives can be hostile.”
“I’m not surprised,” Méret said. “You’re treating them like the enemy. There will be many Viennese who regard themselves as among Hitler’s first victims.”
“Well. Maybe a little token resistance in thirty-eight might have established that fact. You should have seen the bonfire of the swastikas the day we took Vienna. There wasn’t an apartment in the whole goddamn city that hadn’t got a flag or a portrait of the crazy corporal to throw on the pile.”
Méret let the matter drop.
“I want to go there alone.”
“That’s okay. How long do you need?”
“Half an hour?”
“Fine. I’ll meet you there.”
In the literal sense the dust had settled. The Russians had taken Vienna in May and only days ago had carved up city and country between the victorious powers.
It could be worse, she thought. Tosca had brought her newsreels while they were still in Poland, showing the centre of Berlin after the surrender. The Brandenburg Gate was still standing—little else seemed to be. Vienna had taken shelling—here and there a house was reduced to rubble, and occasionally a whole block—but it was still a recognizable city where people tried to live their lives. She wondered that anything larger than rats and mice could live in Berlin.
Devastation lent a curious intimacy. It turned the inside out. To see the interior of a house, for no other reason than that the exterior no longer existed, was a prurience, almost an espionage—the zigzag line up a bare brick wall where a staircase had once stood; a door halfway up a wall that once led to a child’s bedroom and now opened onto a void; a fireplace, grate still intact, perched in space. It was a glimpse into vanished lives. Into private lives. And it felt like a violation.
The building was still standing. The ground floor apartment looked as though it was still lived in. The first floor had lost some of its windows and a lace curtain billowed out into the street as the draughts caught it, almost as though it were waving to her.
The street door was off its hinges. She stepped inside. An old woman she had never seen before was sweeping out the ground floor apartment. The door wobbled as Méret moved it.
“Russkis,” said the old woman. “They kicked it in. Then they ransacked my rooms. Took my sewing machine. What would they want with a sewing machine?”
Upstairs, the door was wide open, a breeze eddying in and out of the apartment. As she’d expected, it was empty. All the traces of human habitation, but empty. The shadow line on the wallpaper in the sitting room where her piano had stood for twenty years. The four indentations on the floorboards in the dining room that marked out the position of the table. The brass hook in the wall where her grandfather’s portrait had hung.
And it smelled empty—she’d no idea empty had its own smell but it had.
It didn’t feel like home. It felt too big. Stripped of everything, it felt vast. As though the return of all her parents’ possessions, of everything on the list, would never fill the space. She had not thought of re-creation. She had come steeled for a last look but part of her mind had always thought re-creation possible. And now she knew—you can’t go back.
She walked from room to room, half hoping to find something the Germans had missed. In the bathroom, she did. Above the basin was a mirrored cabinet, and in the cabinet a small blue bottle with a conical silver cap and a gold label:
It had been her mother’s. It was three-quarters full, so sparingly had it been used since an anniversary trip to Paris in 1929. She had been left with aunts and cried for a whole weekend and when her mother returned she had smelled new, different. Méret unscrewed the cap, dabbed a little of the scent on the back of her right hand and, when the alcohol cleared, smelled the new smell again, smelled her mother fresh from Paris in 1929—and with it the smell of empty vanished.
She went back downstairs.
The old woman was still sweeping up.
“And they took my Franz’s bike!”
Out in the street a man in a tatty jacket and a cloth cap was wheeling a wooden cart laden with junk and rags up the street. When he drew level with Méret he stopped.
“Fraulein Voytek?”
“Herr Knobloch?”
“Your hair? You used to be so dark . . . like a gypsy . . . I thought you were dead.”
“A reasonable assumption, Herr Knobloch.”
“You’re looking for your parents?”
“No. I know they’re dead.”
“They came for them. It would be March or perhaps April last year. I . . . I saw . . .”
Tosca was coming down the street towards them. Knobloch turned his cart around in a swift pivot and pushed it back the way he had come without finishing his sentence.
Tosca was next to her now.
“You know him?”
She might wonder what it was he had to say, she might not be able to stop herself. But she didn’t want to know. If she ever wanted the truth of what fate had fallen to her parents’ lot she could ask Tosca. She felt sure Tosca held a bag of secrets. Every so often she might open the bag and release one, fluttering like a moth to the light.
“He used to be my father’s barber.”
“Jack of all trades. He spies for us and I’m pretty damn certain he spies for the British, too. I guess any barber would make a natural spy. They spend their working lives listening.”
“And if you were to ask him he’d tell you it’s what he has to do to survive.”
“His type always do. Survive, I mean. Anschluss, the Krauts, the draft, allied bombing, occupation by four armies. He’s survived it all.”
“His type?”
“You know what I mean.”
“And me, Major Tosca? What type would you say I was?”
“I’d say you were the type that needs to shake her ass, or do you want to be standing here when some new family arrives?”
“New family?”
“Your folks’ apartment may be missing a few panes of glass and some tiles but it’s habitable. Much of Vienna isn’t. The French have reassigned it to a homeless family, to people bombed out of their own homes by us.”
“But this is my home.”
Tosca looked straight into her eyes.
“Do you really mean that?”
Méret knew—Tosca would never tell her what type she was, and she herself would never volunteer an answer. But her last question had only one possible answer.
“No. I don’t. All this happened to someone else. I don’t know what home is. I’ve forgotten. And I lived here less than eighteen months ago.”
A voice in her head telling her clearly, You can’t go back.
“Wherever it is you mean to take me . . . take me.”
“Okay,” said Tosca. “How would you feel about Paris?”
In her left hand Méret still held the blue bottle of Soir de Paris. She uncurled her fingers, the bottle flat in the palm of her hand for Tosca to see.
“One of your jokes, right?”
“No,” said Tosca. “No joke.”