16

It was changed: it was different. He had expected the signs of destruction and the absence of familiar landmarks, and he had anticipated the monstrous heaps of rubble. But there was another change: in spite of the damage he detected an atmosphere that he could describe to himself only as one of freedom. People were starving and the city lay in ruins, and yet he sensed that even if these were terrible burdens worse ones had been finally and thankfully removed. The black uniforms of the SS, the outfits of the Hitlerjugend, the swastika flags and streamers – they had been obliterated forever, accidents of history, of no more significance than a casual occurrence.

Neurer had parked the truck and they were standing beside it. Grunwald was silent. He felt strange: there was no sense of familiarity, of having returned to a city where he had lived for most of his life, there was no feeling of having come home. But had he expected that?

Neurer said, ‘I want you to have this money.’

‘Money?’

Neurer had taken some banknotes from his jacket. ‘You’ll need it.’

‘No, really, you’ve done enough for me,’ Grunwald said.

‘How are you going to exist?’ Neurer pressed the money into Grunwald’s hand. ‘That’s the money Lutzke gave me. You might as well have it.’

Grunwald stared at the crumpled notes and wished that he could express his gratitude. But Neurer had already opened the cab door and was climbing back into his seat.

‘Are you leaving?’

‘I still have a delivery to make. And it’s a long way back.’

‘I can’t thank you enough.’

Neurer shrugged. ‘Who knows? You might do the same for me some day.’ And then, laughing, he pulled the door shut. He started the engine and Grunwald watched as the truck edged slowly forward. At the end of the street it swung to the right and passed out of Grunwald’s sight.

Alone, Grunwald experienced a sense of dislocation. Munich. Of all places. Why had he come back to a place where he didn’t belong? Did he belong anywhere?

He was in the area around the Hauptbannhof: whole streets had been severely bombed and places he might have recognized no longer existed. People wandered around aimlessly, like sleep-walkers, as if the confusion and chaos that surrounded them were too much to accept at a conscious level. He hesitated, not knowing which way to turn. His immediate impulse was to walk in the direction of Neuhausen. But that would have served no purpose. It was enough to have returned to Munich without also seeking out the very place where he had once lived. Neuhausen and the Hirschgarten, the Steuben-Platz and the Rotkreuz-Platz – did they still exist? Or had they been shattered too in the war?

He felt despair. His indecision seemed to have paralysed him. Which way to turn? Was there anyone left alive he could contact? Did he want to contact anybody? Lost, like a child abandoned by its parents, he moved away slowly. Around him Munich seemed like a web spun by a crazy, destructive spider. This was the place where he had been born, where he had worked, lived and married, fathered a child: why then was it so hostile?

The bakery shop behind the Gabelsbergerstrasse was still there although it was closed now. Its windows were dusty and dark and the name – Gerber – which had once been written in gold paint over the doorway had been removed. He paused in front of it, catching his reflection briefly in the filthy window. Moving forward, he held his hand to the glass and tried to look inside. It was empty so far as he could see. The shelves, streaked with dirt, had been removed from the wall and stacked on top of the counter. He shouldn’t have come here: what had he hoped to find anyway? That at least one part of the past was intact? He dropped his hand from the window. No, he should never have come here. For a moment or two he leaned against the wall and realized the sheer futility of it all. Beyond doubt, the Gerbers had been taken. Why should they have survived anyway? A sixty-year-old Jewish baker and his wife? They hadn’t a chance.

He crossed to the other side of the street: it was just possible to make out the name of Gerber where the gold paint had been removed. Where were they now? Buried in some Polish grave? Perhaps they hadn’t even got as far as Poland; perhaps they had died here, in Germany. He went back across the street again and tried the door, which was locked. He rattled the handle hopefully but without success.

As he was turning away he heard a voice from inside.

‘Hold your horses. I’m coming.’

It was a man’s voice, gruff and unfamiliar. Grunwald waited, suddenly tense. He heard footsteps and then the noise of a bolt being slid back. The door opened a couple of inches. He had never seen the man before. He wore an open waistcoat and was in his shirtsleeves: his clothes looked as if they had been slept in. His spectacles nipped the end of his nose.

‘What is it?’ the man asked.

‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Grunwald said.

‘Mistake? I was having a nap, just getting my head down for forty winks –’

‘I was looking for somebody.’

‘Nobody lives here except me,’ the man said. ‘Who were you looking for?’

‘Herr Gerber and his wife,’ Grunwald said.

‘The old baker?’

‘Do you know him?’

The man opened the door wider and scratched at his belly. ‘I used to know Herr Gerber slightly. A nodding acquaintance, you might say. But it’s years since he lived here. Let me see – I’ve been here since 1941. It’s as long ago as that.’

‘Do you know where he is?’ Grunwald asked.

The man removed his spectacles. There was a white band at the end of the nose where the spectacles had been pinching.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard that he lives in the Schumannstrasse. At least that’s the information I’ve got –’

‘Who told you that?’ Grunwald asked.

‘Who told me?’ The man stroked his face and concentrated a moment. ‘Wait, it’ll come to me. Yes – it was Frau Heinrich, who used to help out in the bakery before the war. She said that she had heard Herr Gerber was living in the Schumannstrasse. But I couldn’t swear to it.’

‘Where is the Schumannstrasse?’

‘It runs off the Holbeinstrasse,’ the man said. ‘Are you related to Herr Gerber?’

‘I’m his nephew,’ Grunwald said.

‘Well, I hope you find him,’ the man said, looking up and down the street absently. ‘I hope he’s in good health.’

Grunwald turned away. Was Gerber really alive? Or was it simply a rumour? He felt suddenly excited, without knowing why: it was as if the possibility of Gerber being alive somehow created a bridge, a frail link, with the better past. He walked to the end of the Gabelsbergerstrasse and paused there, trying to remember his way. It was amazing how quickly one could forget directions that not so long ago were effortlessly brought to mind. He began to hurry, like someone rushing to a death-bed before the sick man expires.

In the Schumannstrasse he realized that he did not have the house number. He stopped the first person he saw, a woman carrying a tattered umbrella. She looked at him curiously when he asked if she knew Herr Gerber: shaking her head, she hurried away. He walked to the end of the street and then, crossing, went down the other side. He had a feeling of quiet panic: what if Gerber didn’t live here and he was wasting his energy? What if it were simply a piece of false gossip passed on by Frau Heinrich to the man in the bakery shop? He stopped on the corner: it was suddenly important to see Gerber, to talk to him, to remind himself that once upon a time there had been a different world. Two teenage boys came round the corner.

‘Excuse me,’ Grunwald said. ‘Do you happen to know if a certain Herr Gerber lives in this street?’

The boys looked at one another. ‘Couldn’t say,’ one of them remarked. ‘What’s he look like?’

Grunwald searched his mind for a description, but it was like fumbling for a forgotten word that seems to lie half-formed in the recesses of the mind. How could he describe Willi? Years had passed and Willi must have changed.

‘He’s old, over sixty,’ he said. But it was hopeless.

One boy said, ‘That could describe any of hundreds.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you might know the name.’

He watched the boys go and then he stood for a time on the corner and wondered what to do. If Willi lived in this street then he would find him, he had to find him. But where to begin? How to look? He could go into the houses one by one, he supposed, and ask for Willi, and by a process of elimination find him that way. It was a small street and it wouldn’t take him long but the prospect overwhelmed him. Talking to strangers in doorways, knocking on doors, asking the same question endlessly: when he considered this he rejected it – somehow such a course of action seemed in a way to be an exposure of himself. He turned and walked back down the street again and when he reached the opposite corner, the junction with the Geibelstrasse, he crossed to the other side.

A man had emerged from a doorway, an elderly man with a brown paper bag clutched under his arm as if it contained his every possession. When he saw Grunwald approach he tightened his hold on the bag like someone who expects to be accosted by bandits on every street corner.

‘I’m looking for a certain Herr Gerber – do you know where I might find him?’ Grunwald asked.

The man looked suddenly secretive: ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m his nephew. I haven’t seen him for some time. I’d like very much to get in touch with him –’

‘Nephew?’ The man put his hand into the bag and brought out a piece of bread which he placed in his mouth and began to chew. ‘Are you really his nephew?’

‘That’s right,’ Grunwald said.

‘I know where you can find him,’ the man said.

‘Where?’ Grunwald put out his hand to touch the man’s sleeve, but he recoiled from the contact.

‘Herr Gerber doesn’t see many people, you understand. He likes to keep himself to himself. You know what I mean?’ The man winked then, like someone betraying a confidence light-heartedly. ‘I’m not sure if he’d want to see you –’

‘I’m his nephew.’

‘That doesn’t matter, does it? He likes to live his own life.’

‘I’m sure he’d like to see me,’ Grunwald said, exasperated.

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ The man scrutinized Grunwald for a moment. ‘Herr Gerber lives in the top flat of this very building,’ he said. ‘That’s where you’ll find him.’

Grunwald moved towards the doorway.

The man said, ‘I sometimes play card games with him. It whiles away the hours.’

‘Thank you. Thank you.’ Grunwald said and went through the door.

He felt Willi’s rough hands upon his face as he was clasped towards the other man’s body and held tightly against him. When Willi finally stepped back, Grunwald saw that his eyes were watering as if he were about to cry but could not find the capacity to weep. He stepped further back, framing Grunwald, like someone taking a snapshot: his expression was incredulous and yet grateful, in the manner of someone receiving a gift of the very thing he had thought irretrievably lost. He did not speak for some time and Grunwald noticed exactly how much he had changed since their last meeting. He was thinner, yes, but that was to be expected: what Grunwald found difficult to absorb was the nature of the thinness – as if his uncle were suffering from some incurable, wasting disease. His flesh had a certain transparency and his eyes protruded prominently, and his hands – with which he had worked all his life – were hardly more than bones at the ends of his emaciated wrists. His hair, always thick in the past, was now sparse and barely covered his skull.

‘Leonhard,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Leonhard …’

Grunwald experienced a confusion of emotion. Seeing Willi again was delightful in itself, but there were so many areas of past experience it would be painful to touch. How could he talk to Willi about Poland? The sheer necessity for secrecy was something that Grunwald already felt had come between them, an invisible thing that would always hold him back from Willi. How could he say to Willi: Look, I am guilty …? It was impossible. Why couldn’t he accept the fact that they had both survived and that they were having an unexpected reunion? That should have been easy, and yet Grunwald felt an accumulating sense of desperation, as if he were deliberately depriving Willi of the most important thing of all – the true facts of the last few years.

Willi was still standing in the middle of the room. His arms hung by his side and there crossed his face for a flickering moment a suggestion of some internal pain. But he smiled, raised his arms, and held them there in mid-air in an empty embrace.

‘Leonhard,’ he said. ‘This is impossible. How can this be? I feel that if I close my eyes and open them again you’ll have vanished.’

Grunwald held his uncle’s hand. ‘I’ve been in Berlin,’ he said. ‘It isn’t very easy, travelling conditions the way they are.’

‘Leonhard,’ Willi said, and flexed his hand feebly around Grunwald’s wrist. ‘You will not believe me. But only yesterday I was thinking about you. Only last night. I still have some old photographs and I was looking at them, the way an old man does, ransacking his memory the way an old man does, and I looked at the one taken of you and Martha on your wedding day.’

Not that, Grunwald thought. The old man was already plundering the past insensitively. Couldn’t it wait?

‘Changed days,’ Willi said. ‘Changed days, Leonhard.’

‘Everything changes,’ Grunwald said.

Willi sucked in his breath and shook his head. ‘Too many ghosts, far too many ghosts.’ He went to his chair and sat down and a renewed expression of disbelief crossed his face. ‘I can hardly credit it, Leonhard. After all those years. I made enquiries about you. Do you know that? I filled in a form and told the authorities that I wanted to know what had become of you. I heard nothing, of course. One hears nothing these days. And so I thought that you were dead. I thought you must have been killed.’

Willi smiled palely. He sat for a time in silence, shaking his head, as if he were pondering the terrible absurdities of life.

‘And here you are. My God, I can hardly believe it.’

‘I went to the bakery first,’ Grunwald said.

‘The bakery? They took that away from me in 1941 under one of their silly laws. Aryanization of businesses, they said. They stuck a notice in the window and told me I had to get out. I suppose I was lucky to have it as late as 1941. I used to imagine they had overlooked me, that’s what I thought, they’d forgotten about me, tucked away behind the Gabelsbergerstrasse. But they hadn’t. They forgot nothing.’

Willi paused. He was perspiring. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘But I was too smart for them in the end. I knew they would arrest me eventually, so I cleared out. What they didn’t know was the fact that I had quite a bit of money tucked away in the bakery. I moved around from one place to another, keeping just ahead of them, just out of their reach. Who wants to bother with an old man anyway?’

Grunwald looked at the room. There were one or two items of scrappy furniture: another door, to his right, was partly open and he could see a large brass bed.

‘In one way it was lucky that they didn’t seize the bakery earlier,’ Willi said. ‘Alice was ill early in 1941 and she died two weeks before they took the business away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grunwald said. ‘I didn’t know she was dead.’

‘How could you?’ Willi made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘She died painlessly. At least I’m thankful for that.’

Grunwald remembered Alice as a thin little woman who never uttered a word unless it had her husband’s complete approval. She lived and died painlessly: her existence had always seemed to Grunwald grey and monotonous.

‘So you see, I managed to escape the camps,’ Willi said. ‘In some ways a great blessing, Leonhard. But in others not. For example, sometimes I think of my old friends, all of whom were taken, and I wonder if I would have been better off if they had taken me as well.’

There was a whine of martyrdom in Willi’s voice suddenly. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, as if he were trying to spark some mood of cheerfulness into himself. He turned to Grunwald and said, ‘I suppose I’ve been fortunate, especially when you compare me with all the others. Dead, all of them. I’m the only one left, apart from yourself, Leonhard.’

He smiled to himself and rose uncertainly from the chair.

‘It’s good to see you, to know that you’re alive,’ he said, and put his hand on Grunwald’s shoulder. Suddenly he was weeping, his face pressed flat against Grunwald’s arm, his body moving up and down as he cried. Grunwald led him back to the chair and made him sit down: he didn’t know how to cope with the old man’s tears. His face was moist and the expression one of complete surrender to pain: Grunwald wished he had a handkerchief to offer.

‘Don’t upset yourself, Willi,’ he said. He clapped the back of Willi’s hand comfortingly. After a moment the old man raised his head and tried to smile. He sniffed several times, cleared his throat, wiped his face with his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Leonhard. Becoming a bit emotional in old age, that’s all.’ He smiled again and clutched Grunwald’s hand tightly.

After a moment he said, ‘So tell me what there is to know about yourself.’

Grunwald hesitated: it was the question he knew would come.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘As you wish,’ Willi said. ‘I understand your reluctance.’

Do you? Grunwald wondered. He crossed the room to the window, which overlooked a tiny rear yard stuffed with garbage. What does Willi understand? In the yard a couple of children had appeared and they were sifting impatiently through the rubbish.

‘The last I heard of you, Leonhard, was that you had been taken. Nobody knew where. Nobody dared to ask questions.’ Willi spread his thin hands, like someone looking for warmth from a source of heat. ‘Not knowing, you see, that was the worst thing of all. You were dead. I knew that you were dead.’

Dead? Grunwald turned from the window and looked at his uncle. By a peculiar trick of light, Willi seemed no more substantial than a sheet of flimsy paper. He carried the mark of death upon him, as surely as if he had been mortally wounded by a burst of gunfire: he had the appearance of a corpse. What keeps him alive? What drags him from one day to the next? What is he living for? Grunwald stood by the old man’s chair.

‘I was in Mauthausen,’ he said.

‘God help you,’ Willi said.

‘And then I was in Poland.’

‘Poland?’ Willi half-rose from his chair: ‘What have they done to us, Leonhard? What have they done?’

Grunwald looked at the old man. Years ago he had been energetic, strong, filled with an exuberant sense of life. Now, wasting away, it was as if the earlier man had not existed at all.

‘After Poland, I made my way back to Berlin,’ Grunwald said.

‘And you’ve been in Berlin ever since?’ Willi asked.

‘Until now,’ Grunwald said: a moment of embarrassment arose, conjured up out of seemingly nothing, as he studied the old man’s questioning face and realized that Willi wanted to hear more, he wanted as many details as possible.

There was a slow silence. Cries from the yard below penetrated the room. A child was shouting.

‘In Poland,’ – Willi said, and then faltered. ‘In Poland, were you in one of those death camps?’

Grunwald paused: he felt suddenly conspiratorial.

‘I was in one of the extermination camps,’ he said.

Willi looked puzzled. ‘You were lucky then, you were lucky they didn’t exterminate you.’

Grunwald said nothing. He was conscious now of the way his blood seemed to race through him, as if it were frantically trying to elude some impending menance. Lucky? For a moment he wanted to open his mouth and make a confession and tell Willi what he had done to survive the camp and the life he had lived, but he could not bring himself to unlock the nightmare, he could not force himself to cross the fragile line that marked the end of the deception.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was lucky. I was fortunate. They could only exterminate a certain number every day. Working at full capacity, they still didn’t have time for everybody.’

Willi sighed. ‘There’s nothing one can say, is there? It baffles the imagination. It bewilders me. How could they have done it? How could they have murdered so many people? It’s strange, isn’t it? I never used to think of myself as a Jew. I was always a German, a good German citizen, I have medals from the First War, I never thought of myself as being a Jew. And then they forced me to think of myself in that way. But I used to say to myself that it couldn’t happen to me, because I was a German.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Grunwald said.

‘I hate them now. I hate all Germans now.’ Willi began to cough and wiped mucus from his lips. ‘I’m ashamed of them.’

Grunwald was silent. He walked up and down the room, the feeling that he should never have sought Willi out beginning to grow: everything was changed: a volcano had erupted and everything was dressed in ashes and darkness. He looked down at the ragged children in the yard below. They reminded him of the skinny, taciturn children he had seen in the camps. So much human garbage. So much junk. He pitied himself and the world. There was a tight, jagged sensation in his chest and throat. Sickness everywhere. Something healthy – would he ever see something healthy again? He pressed his face to the glass, aware that Willi was rambling on and on about what had happened to Munich. Knappertsbusch, having been banned by the Nazis, had returned to conduct the Philharmonic: a new newspaper, the Münchener Stadtanzeiger, had appeared: Hansel and Gretel had been performed in the Prince Regent Theatre: the Rathaus bell was ringing again: it was said that the statue of Patrona Bavariae was to be re-erected in the Marienplatz: ten former inmates of Dachau had been elected to the City Council. But Grunwald was barely listening to these snippets: they were insignificant to him, even if for Willi they were the stuff of his daily life.

‘I used to love this city,’ Willi said. ‘But not now.’

Grunwald turned away from the window. The children were gone. The yard was empty.

He shuffled towards the gas-stove and lit the ring under the kettle.

‘You can’t get real coffee these days except on the black market,’ he said. ‘So we use this powdered rubbish. But at least it will heat you up.’

Grunwald watched as the kettle began to boil. Willi took two cups from a wooden cabinet and brewed the coffee. He handed one to Grunwald. The liquid was dark and tasteless. They sat for a time in silence, drinking.

And then Willi said, ‘I take it you’ve heard nothing about Martha and the boy –’

‘Nothing,’ Grunwald answered. ‘It’s hopeless. They’re dead. I know it for a fact.’

Willi shrugged. ‘We mustn’t give up hope, Leonhard.’

‘Hope?’ Grunwald failed to recognize the word: could Willi conceivably have some tiny reserve of optimism even now? It was hardly credible.

‘They’re dead,’ he said. ‘I know they’re dead.’

Willi sipped his drink. ‘You have to look forward, Leonhard. Forward, not back.’

Forward, not back. Grunwald stared at his uncle in surprise. What gave the old man his banal philosophical strength? How had he managed to retain his platitudinous shell in the face of everything?

‘What’s gone is gone,’ Willi said.

Grunwald turned his face away. It was more than he could stand to listen to the old man. Willi got up suddenly and went to the wooden cabinet by the stove. He took out an envelope and returned with it to his chair. Opening the envelope, he produced some photographs.

‘Have a look at these,’ he said. ‘They should cheer you up.’

‘Please,’ Grunwald said. ‘I don’t like old pictures –’

‘Go on,’ Willi said. ‘It won’t do any harm.’

Grunwald stared at the photographs in the old man’s hands with a sensation of mounting horror. Photographs. Pictures of the dead. Snapshots of the damned. He closed his eyes, aware of the inconsistency in the old man’s approach. If one were to look forward and not back, what good did it do to scrutinize old photographs? He felt the envelope being pushed into his hands. Opening his eyes he stared at the blurred snapshot that lay in front of him.

‘Remember that?’ Willi asked, suddenly alive and animated. ‘Hilda and Josef in the foreground, you and Martha at the back, and Alice and myself to the one side. 1932. Autumn. That time we all went for the weekend to Josef’s cabin at Friedrichshafen. Do you remember that?’

Grunwald looked at the photograph. Her eyes screwed up against the sunlight, a straw hat on her dark hair, a white dress hanging on her loosely, Martha had a frozen appearance. He realized he had forgotten how she had been: the eyes crinkled in that characteristic way of hers, the incongruously large straw hat he had purchased for her in Ravensburg that seemed to eclipse her face, the slight forward thrust of the lips as if she were about to launch into an argument. And then the photograph seemed to melt away as he looked at it and he turned it over: Willi had written on the back the words Friedrichshafen, 1932.

‘Here’s another,’ Willi said, and thrust a second picture forward. It showed a group of people sitting in a field in front of an outspread tablecloth that lay across the grass. ‘The time we drove down towards Rosenheim for a picnic. Funny, I can’t remember the year. It must have been 1931.’

Grunwald studied the photograph closely. He had no recollection of a picnic near Rosenheim and so far as he could see he wasn’t amongst the group of people on the grass. But Martha was there, seated at the back, half-hidden. Her head thrown slightly back, she seemed to be laughing about something. But a shadow lay across her face and it was difficult to make out the features. Grunwald held the picture a moment longer, his finger moving across Martha’s face as if he were trying to impose reality and texture upon the flat surface of the photograph. Willi should never have produced these snapshots: what good did they do? What was the use of stirring up so much dust? Of producing impossible longings? He pushed the photograph back inside the envelope.

‘There’s plenty more,’ Willi said. ‘Look –’

‘Not now, Willi. Please.’

‘You’re tired. You’ve had a long journey.’

‘Yes. I’m tired.’

‘Then you must get some rest. You must wash and shave. Get some fresh clothes. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about things, Leonhard. We’ll have lots of time.’ He suddenly clutched Grunwald, as if he were afraid of letting him out of his sight. ‘Go into the bedroom and lie down. Rest for as long as you like. You need it.’

Grunwald went into the bedroom, hardly more than a boxroom that was crowded by the large brass bed, and lay down. He pulled the covers over his body. Willi sat on the edge of the bed a moment. And then, leaning forward, he pressed his lips against Grunwald’s forehead.

He got up from the bed, slightly embarrassed by his own display of affection, and left the room. Grunwald watched the door shut and then wiped the moisture from his forehead with the palm of his hand. He should never have come: it was more than he could possibly tolerate.

Some hours later he woke and heard the sound of voices from the other room. For a moment he could not remember where he was. The bed was strange to him and the room, with its tiny barred window, threw him momentarily off balance. He pushed the covers back and stood up. Brushing his hair from his face, he went towards the door. The voices had stopped now. He hesitated a moment and then pulled the door open.

In the other room Willi was sitting by the gas stove, the envelope of snapshots still in his hands. At his side there was a woman: she must have been in her late twenties. As Grunwald entered, she turned round. Willi rose from his chair, one arm extended in a greeting. Grunwald stopped: he had not expected to find a woman there.

Willi said, ‘Leonhard – let me introduce you to Fräulein Strauss.’ The woman held out her hand and Grunwald accepted it. It was curiously cold and as he touched it he shivered imperceptibly.

‘My nephew, Leonhard,’ Willi said to the woman. ‘I’ve just been telling her how you’ve come back from the dead, Leonhard.’

‘Remarkable,’ the woman said. ‘Herr Gerber has told me that he had given up all hope for you.’

Grunwald was embarrassed a little: it was as if his uncle had turned him into some kind of hero. He looked down at the floor. There was something about the woman’s eyes. He had the odd sensation that she was mocking him. Was it just his imagination? Was it his guilt? Did he assume automatically that he was transparent?

‘It takes great courage and endurance to have survived,’ she said.

He looked at her again. It was impossible to be certain, but he had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that she was subtly trying to provoke him – as if his heroism were a blatant lie that she desperately wanted to puncture. But why did he think this? Why did he imagine hostility in her manner? She was half-smiling, her lips fixed, her eyes cutting into him.

There was a moment of silence and Grunwald found that he could no longer meet the woman’s eyes: they were clear and sharp, piercing him in a way that he found troublesome. He turned away and went to the window. It was beginning to get dark and he realized he had no idea of time. Was it late afternoon?

‘Let’s hope that you can re-establish yourself,’ she said.

Re-establish? It was a strange word: clinical and formal. Why had she chosen that? What did she mean?

‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. He wanted to shift the conversation and so he asked: ‘Are you a neighbour of my uncle’s?’

‘A neighbour?’ Willi interrupted. ‘She’s far more than that, Leonhard. She’s my lifeline. If it weren’t for Elisabeth, God knows what I would do. She fetches things for me because I don’t get around very much. She gets my rations. She picks up one or two things on the black market for me. Sometimes she even cooks me a meal –’

‘Whenever we can get any decent food, that is,’ Fräulein Strauss said. She was leaning now against the wall, her hands clasped in front of her. Her eyes had not moved from Grunwald’s face since he had entered the room. She seemed to be scrutinizing him, as if she were seeking the solution to an intricate problem. He turned to look at her, fascinated by her expression. He judged that she was about twenty-eight: she was thin, dark-haired, her eyes a peculiar shade of bright blue. Why was she staring at him? What was it that she wanted to understand?

Willi said, ‘Elisabeth is a blessing to me.’

Fräulein Strauss smiled. ‘We keep each other company,’ she said to Grunwald.

Grunwald felt that he was imprisoned by her gaze: it trapped and encircled him, and yet he could not avoid the suspicion that she was examining him as she might have done any stranger who had survived the holocaust, and who was reluctant – for reasons that she could not obviously fathom – to tell his story. Was that it? Did she want to hear how he had coped with the concentration camps? Was he some sort of novelty for her? He tried to clear his mind: he was imagining things. There was nothing extraordinary in the way she looked at him.

Willi said, ‘Elisabeth lives in the room along the corridor.’

Grunwald said, ‘Does she?’

‘Sometimes she comes in and cleans up.’

‘When I have the energy,’ Fräulein Strauss said. ‘But energy, like any other commodity, is at a premium these days.’

Willi sighed: ‘It can’t get any worse,’ he said. ‘Things are getting better all the time.’

They were silent again, as if all three knew that this was a He. The woman began to move around the room, tidying up here and there in a casual fashion. Grunwald watched her a moment and wondered why she helped Willi: charity, pity. When she had finished, and had put the broom away, she said to Willi; ‘It’s time for your nap.’

Willi groaned. ‘I’m not even tired –’

‘No complaints,’ she said. ‘You know that you need it.’

‘You’re like a nurse,’ Willi said. ‘She’s just like a nurse. Leonhard.’

She clapped her hands together briskly. ‘Come on.’

‘You bully me.’

‘You wouldn’t look after yourself, would you?’ She helped him out of the chair. Willi was laughing, as if the whole thing were a joke they played out together every day at the same time. She led him towards the bedroom. Grunwald watched the door swing slowly shut and listened to the sounds of Willi climbing into the bed. He looked around the room. It was neat and tidy now. She had washed the dirty cups and swept the floor and had tidied the various papers that lay around, stacking them neatly on top of the cabinet.

She emerged from the room a minute later, wiping a strand of hair from her forehead.

‘He always sleeps for a few hours at this time of day,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to, but it does him good.’

‘He’s sick,’ Grunwald said. ‘He’s changed so much.’

She looked at Grunwald a moment, her head tilted to one side.

‘He’s dying,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder he’s lived as long as this.’ She was busy again, replacing the photographs inside the brown envelope.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Cancer,’ she answered.

‘Christ,’ Grunwald sat down: the old man was suffering from cancer.

‘Even if medical treatment was possible, it would do no good,’ she said. ‘And he knows it better than anyone.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grunwald said. ‘To come all this way to see him, and then to find he’s dying –’

‘I understand. Everything seems so painful these days.’

She had stopped in the middle of the floor. She looked sad. Her arms hung by her side listlessly. Staring at her, Grunwald was conscious of the fact that she was attractive: she was by no means beautiful, but her face – which was intelligent, pale, knowing – suggested something far removed from any mundane concepts of beauty. Had she suffered? The question needed no answer: everyone had suffered.

She said, ‘I feel so sorry for him. I like to help as much as I can. It makes it a bit easier for him.’

Grunwald felt like an intruder who has stumbled in on some intense personal grief: he felt clumsy and unhappy.

‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him dying alone,’ she said.

She was standing in a peculiar fashion by the door now, as if yielding to some immense weight. Her shoulders sagged and her face had altered: the features seemed to have become blurred. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Grunwald offered her a chair and she accepted.

He went to the window and looked down into the yard at the rear. It was empty now and silent: rain, falling softly, swept across the garbage heaps. He turned to the woman: ‘How long will he last?’

‘I don’t know. A month? Three months? He might die tomorrow. You can see how ill he looks.’ She paused a moment, closing her eyes, resting her head against the back of the chair. ‘He suffers great pain, although he never says anything about it. He hardly complains. This room – doesn’t it smell of death to you?’

Grunwald looked round the room. It was impersonal and cold, as if Willi, in preparation for his death, had discarded almost all of his private possessions.

‘What do you do?’ he said.

‘Do?’

‘Do you work?’

‘No, I don’t work.’ She was twisting her fingers together in a tormented way. He was on the point of asking about her war years, when he decided against it. In the failing light she appeared improbably pale and bloodless. There were dark circles under her eyes and tiny lines around the corners of her mouth. What was she thinking?

‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

She held up her bare wrist. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I’d like to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Will you come?’

He didn’t know why he had asked or even why he particularly wanted to walk. The room was stifling him.

‘It would make a pleasant change,’ she said and she smiled. She rose slowly from the chair. ‘I’ll get my coat.’

When she went out of the room Grunwald washed his face and hands in the sink, and shaved with Willi’s razor. For the first time in months he had noticed that there was a distinct smell – from his flesh, from his clothes – of dirt and staleness. It had never bothered him before but suddenly he wanted to scrub himself clean.

Fräulein Strauss reappeared in the doorway, wearing a navy blue raincoat.

‘It isn’t very glamorous, is it?’

‘It’ll keep you dry,’ Grunwald said, and watched as she turned round: after a moment he followed.

The Americans had entered Munich on 30th April: they had met no resistance. But the city around them had been flattened by damaging air-raids and Grunwald could see the signs of destruction everywhere. It was a sight he had become accustomed to in Berlin except that now, in Munich, it seemed far more personal, more painful, because these were streets and buildings he had known particularly well. Fräulein Strauss told him that between the summer of 1940 and the end of the war, there had been about a hundred air attacks on the city and that thousands of people had lost their homes. She also told him that someone had painted an inscription on the National Socialist shrine, the Feldherrnhalle, that said: ‘Concentration camps of Dachau, Velden, Buchenwald, I am ashamed of being German.’

They walked as far as the Maximilianeum and from there they crossed the river to the Widenmayerstrasse. The Isar looked strangely green and swollen in the gathering darkness and they stood and looked at it together for some minutes in silence. They went on as far as the Luitpold Bridge where they could see the gardens of the Maximilians-Anlagen. Grunwald felt less and less that he had come home and more and more that he was a morbid tourist exploring the scenic grandeur of destruction.

Fräulein Strauss said, ‘People don’t have much to eat these days. We have ration cards, but sometimes the rations don’t seem to be available. It’s terrible. You remember what Munich used to be like and it’s terrible when you compare it with that.’

Grunwald watched the river and the rain that fell along its surface. She would have been about fifteen years of age when the National Socialists had come to power, no more than a happy young girl, carefree, perhaps experiencing her first love affair: what had she done when the shadows had begun to fall?

Someone was burning something in the gardens across the river. A few sparks rose up in the air, followed by a bright orange flame. He stared at this and then at the woman. In the reflected glow her face seemed to assume a different shape: her eyes, now blank, were directed inwards. Rain had soaked her hair and flat strands were plastered across her forehead. She looked impossibly young all at once, like a schoolgirl savouring the excitement of her first adult dance.

‘What did you do?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ She didn’t turn to look at him. Her gaze was fixed in the direction of the bonfire around which the shapes of several people had materialized.

Grunwald was silent. He had no right to ask her anything.

‘What did I do in the war? Is that what you mean?’

Grunwald nodded his head. Beneath them a motor launch was going down the river and a man was shouting inaudible words through a loudspeaker.

‘I did nothing,’ she said. ‘Like Herr Gerber, I didn’t end up in a camp. I stayed in my room.’

He imagined that she was being flippant. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I say. I stayed in my room.’ She was moving away from him and he followed.

‘Which room?’

‘Oh – it was just a room.’ She seemed to want to tease him now: she appeared to enjoy a sense of being enigmatic. He followed her down the Widenmayerstrasse. She was walking quickly, as if she didn’t want him to catch up on her.

‘Where was this room?’ he asked.

‘In a house.’ She stopped by the side of the street and looked down at the Isar.

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Between the Kristallnacht and the surrender of Munich, I didn’t leave my room. Does that make sense?’ She saw his look of puzzlement. ‘I was sheltered. Protected. The people with whom I was living protected me. They brought me food. They concealed me. They put themselves in terrible danger for harbouring a Jewess. But they were opponents of the regime and they considered it an act of Christian charity to hide me and support me. Now do you see what I mean?’

‘You must have left the room sometimes,’ Grunwald said.

‘Never. How could I? It was an attic room with a tiny window that was partially boarded up. It contained a bed. It had primitive lavatory requirements. Twice a day these people brought me something to eat and books to read. They gave me cigarettes to smoke and newspapers so that I could keep in touch with what was going on. Except that the newspapers contained nothing but propaganda lies.’

‘I’m not sure that I understand you,’ Grunwald said. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t go out of doors between November 1938 and April 1945?’

‘Six and a half years,’ she said. ‘I stayed in the room all that time. How could I have left it? That would have involved the betrayal of the people who let me live there.’

Grunwald was astonished: ‘But what did you do?’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Yes, I believe you. But what did you do all the time?’

‘I told you. I read books. I read everything from Kant to German translations of cowboy novels.’ She paused a moment. ‘That wasn’t enough, of course. I had my fantasies as well. I devised games.’

‘What games?’

‘Paper games. I created amusements for myself. I devised a complex kind of chequers. I planned the assassination of Hitler. I amused myself.’

She was talking flippantly and Grunwald wondered if she were telling the truth. How was it possible to live for six and a half years in an attic room without going out once? He imagined the murderous strain that such an existence would have imposed upon him.

‘It’s hard to grasp,’ he said.

‘It was more pleasant than Dachau,’ she said. ‘I was able to talk to people twice a day, when they brought my food upstairs. I ate reasonably well. I was bored much of the time, naturally, and I longed for the open fields. I used to dream that the war was over and that someone, a lover perhaps, would come and rescue me. I lived in my mind for six and a half years.’

Grunwald caught her by the arm. ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

She didn’t answer. Instead, she said, ‘You can’t imagine how much I longed for fresh air and wide spaces. Every day seemed the same as the one before, except for the fact that the room was getting smaller. It was dwindling around me. It was choking me. I couldn’t have survived much longer without going insane. Do you know? When the war ended, when Munich had surrendered to the Americans, I was afraid to step outside and put my foot on the ladder. I was afraid to leave the place. Can you imagine that? The one thing I really wanted to do, and I was scared to death of doing it. It was incredible.’

Grunwald took his hand from her arm.

‘Six and a half years,’ Grunwald said. ‘Who were these people?’

‘A Protestant pastor and his wife whom I had known since I was a child. They took me in after the Kristallnacht. My mother, she was a widow, was burned to death that night. I was alone. I had to turn to someone. And they protected me.’

Grunwald looked down at the Isar. The rain had stopped now, but darkness had fallen over everything. He felt a sudden desire to protect the woman, as if she were a child abandoned in a dark place, but the desire was bound up with the sense of pity that he felt. To touch her would be to contaminate her: she had far more courage than he could ever have possessed.

‘I would have gone mad,’ he said, and the remark lay between them feebly.

‘Would you?’ She turned round to face him. ‘It’s surprising how much strength we find when we’re afraid. Don’t you think that’s true? Didn’t you find that?’

Grunwald shrugged. They had now come as far as the Steinsdorfstrasse, which led to the Ludwigsbridge. Rain began again, blowing out of the darkness in a squall.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘six and a half years isn’t much out of a lifetime, is it?’

People moved through the darkness. Grunwald watched their wretched shapes shift through the shadows of buildings: they had the air of predators in a season of famine. They reached the other side of the river and crossed the Mariahilfplatz. He found that he did not want to talk to her, that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to contribute: he had become surprisingly bitter within himself, as if her courage and stoicism were a deliberate affront to him. But how could he be affronted? He had no sense of his own dignity left, and found something curious in the idea that some people did have dignity: Elisabeth Strauss, for instance, could live with herself comfortably. Thrusting his hands into his overcoat, he suddenly wished that she would go away and take her courage with her. He had never been anything other than a coward, afraid of decision, terrified of action and conflict, scared of death.

They returned in silence to the house in the Schumannstrasse. As they climbed the stairs she asked him if he wanted to come into her room. He followed her inside, saying nothing. It was smaller than Willi’s room. In one corner there was a bed upon which lay a pile of freshly laundered clothes. She moved them, placing them neatly inside a chest, and then she sat on the bed.

Looking at Grunwald, she asked: ‘Why are you so sad?’

‘Am I sad?’

‘You have a sad expression.’

Grunwald shrugged: ‘Your story has upset me perhaps. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll make coffee. Would you like that?’ She filled a pot with water and put it on the gas-stove. She said nothing until the water boiled, and then she passed him a cup. ‘You’re an unhappy man, Leonhard. Why are you unhappy?’

Grunwald sipped his coffee. He looked at her: her damp hair hung down untidily in thick strands, but her face was shining from the rain. He had an urge to touch her, as if by the very act of laying his fingers upon her face he could understand something of her courage.

‘Your experiences have made you unhappy, haven’t they?’

‘They weren’t exactly filled with joy,’ he answered.

‘You know I didn’t mean that.’ She looked upset and he realized that his reply must have seemed needlessly sarcastic and bitter. ‘Why can’t you accept the fact that you are alive? That you have a life to lead? You can’t go around in such a miserable –’

‘Am I miserable?’ Grunwald asked.

‘Don’t ask me. I can only tell you how you look.’ She put her empty cup on the floor and lay across the bed propped up on one elbow. She stared at Grunwald for a time and then she said, ‘I know terrible things have happened to everybody. You can’t meet anyone nowadays without colliding with some tragedy or another. But they aren’t important any longer. Don’t you see that? It’s history. Life has to be a process of going forward, and forward again.’

‘You sound like Willi,’ he said.

She threw her head back and laughed: ‘Do I sound pompous?’

‘Not in the least.’

She had stopped laughing and was looking at Grunwald intently, trying to place him in her mind, attempting to categorize him. She sat up on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs, never taking her eyes from his face. He felt again the sensation he had experienced on first meeting her, that somehow she was trying to cut her way into him, as if it were important to her to discover what lay beyond the façade and inhabited the mind. He found it uncomfortable.

‘Plans,’ she said. ‘People have to make plans nowadays.’

‘Do you have plans?’

‘A few.’

‘Such as?’

‘As soon as it can be arranged, I’ll go to Palestine. Why should I stay in Germany? It isn’t the same for me here any more. Even the language sounds harsh because I can remember what it was used for and the kinds of things people said in German. That’s bad, isn’t it? That the language should have been poisoned for me forever.’ She thought for a moment and then added: ‘Do you remember when they used to broadcast Goebbels’s speeches? We sat huddled round the radio, shaking our heads. That’s when it started for me – the feeling that if the language could become so tainted, then it wouldn’t be very long before the people followed in the same direction.’

She seemed suddenly to have become imbued with a new energy. She got up from the bed and walked about the room in a restless way.

‘And then they started to burn books. Who could ever forget that? Somehow that was the worst thing of all. When I heard about it, I was shattered. It was unbelievable that people could burn books. The twentieth century! It Was incredible. Didn’t you feel like that when you heard?’

‘I considered it the action of a few hooligans,’ Grunwald said, and noticed the look of disappointment that spread across her face.

‘How wrong you were,’ she said. ‘Then Kristallnacht. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. We were woken up, it must have been around midnight, people were running through the streets and some were being beaten up on the pavements, and there was this awful smell of burning. I woke up and I remember thinking: They’ve come to murder us. The building was on fire. I got out of my bedroom. The stairs were blazing. I heard my mother scream. And the awful thing is that I could see her through the flames and I couldn’t do a thing about it. She was trapped in her own bedroom, she was screaming, I was screaming, she was wandering up and down in a panic, like a trapped animal, and her nightdress was aflame. After that, she just disappeared.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I rushed through the fire on to the street and started to run. Buildings were burning. People were lying around covered in blood. A stormtrooper caught hold of me and forced me into a side-street. I struggled and eventually I got away. He didn’t bother to chase me. I ran until I reached the house of the Pastor and his wife.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I knew for certain that the position of the Jews in Germany was hopeless.’

Grunwald looked at his hands and imagined that he must have known the same thing as well: why for God’s sake hadn’t he acted in time to save himself and his family? If there had ever been an answer to that question, it lay buried now.

‘Palestine,’ she said. ‘That’s where I shall go. There isn’t any other place on earth I want to go to so badly. I want to get away from all those memories. Wherever I turn nowadays I find that everything in Germany is stale and dead and utterly defeated.’

Stale and dead and utterly defeated. For a moment Grunwald wondered if Palestine could offer him a new chance. He imagined sunlight and dust, blind white buildings sizzling in the heat, endless miles of scrubland. But the images were unreal, related to nothing he had ever seen or could hope to see.

‘Do you have plans?’ she asked.

‘Not especially,’ he answered.

‘You must. How can you live without grand schemes?’

‘How could I live with them?’

She stopped walking around and stood just in front of him. She touched the back of his hand with her fingers. Puzzled, he looked at her, but she was staring at his hands. Folding her fingers, she caught his wrist gently and held it a moment: and then, stooping slightly, she pressed her mouth to the tips of his fingers. He drew his hand away abruptly as if something unbearably hot had been dropped there.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘Because I wanted to think you might be happy.’

‘You don’t know me.’

‘I still don’t like it if you’re miserable.’

‘Why did you want to touch me?’

‘You seem lonely.’

‘For God’s sake.’

‘It wasn’t pity, if that’s what you’re thinking. You must have a very low opinion of yourself if you suspect people of pitying you.’

He got up from his chair: he had to get out of her room. He went in the direction of the door.

‘Are you going?’

‘I’m tired.’

‘Are you staying with Herr Gerber?’

‘For the time being.’

She smiled at him: ‘Then we’ll meet again tomorrow.’

Closing the door behind him quietly, he left. He stood for some time on the landing, thinking of the woman. He drew his hand from his pocket and stared at it: what had she been trying to tell him? What had her gesture meant? He imagined that he detected in it an expression of humility: she had put her lips to his fingers as a person with incalculable wealth might wash the feet of a beggar.

Willi was still sleeping. The sound of his snoring filled the tiny apartment. Grunwald went into the bedroom and looked at his uncle for a time. Mouth open, arms thrown back behind his head, the old man was breathing with some difficulty. He would be dead before long: and after he was dead, who else would be left?

Grunwald went into the other room and pushed two chairs together and lay uncomfortably between them. Fatigue settled on him like a heavy stone and he fell sharply into an undisturbed sleep.