‘The Germans have fallen under the spell of a madman, much of the German army, also. Though they are realists, too, they know now that they can never conquer all of Russia. I think when Hitler dies the army and the SS will fight each other.’ She smiled. ‘And then the Resistance in Europe will have a great opportunity.’
Frank said, ‘The Germans must never get hold of my secret. You do understand that.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded seriously. ‘It must be hard, carrying dangerous knowledge in your head.’
‘But you don’t know what it is, do you?’ Frank looked alarmed for a moment.
‘No.’
He hesitated, then asked, ‘Do you carry one of those poison pills David has?’
‘Yes.’
‘I told him to ask you if I could have one.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid the answer is no. If the Germans come, I promise you they won’t take any of us alive.’ She looked him in the eye. He admired her clear, cool directness.
‘You must think about dying too, all of you,’ he said. ‘A sudden blackness, ceasing to exist. Or heaven, walking in a garden with Jesus.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Or hell. The lives God gives to us, the awful things we can’t escape from. Sometimes I think that sort of God would enjoy making hell for us after we die.’
‘I think we’ll all just face the blackness.’
‘So do I, really.’
‘May I sit down?’ Natalia asked.
‘Of course.’
There were no chairs in the room so she sat on the floor opposite him, leaning back against the wall. Frank asked, ‘Why do you want to keep me alive?’
‘I’ve been told it’s what the Americans want. For us to rescue you and get you to the coast.’
‘Aren’t you curious? You and the Resistance people? About what I know?’
She smiled. ‘We’ve been told not to ask. And the Resistance is like an army, we’re soldiers, we obey orders.’
‘You kill people like soldiers as well, don’t you? The stories about bombs and assassinations, they’re true, aren’t they?’
‘I wish there were another way. But all other roads have been blocked off.’
‘Have you killed anyone yourself?’
She didn’t answer. Frank said, ‘My brother, he started all this, put us all in danger.’
She smiled sadly. ‘I had a brother, too.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. But he was not like yours. We were close. But he had – what they call mental problems. Difficulties in dealing with the world. When he was young he was very confident, but I think there was always fear underneath.’
‘Did he go to hospital like me?’
‘No.’
‘My brother Edgar was confident. Everything came his way. Or seemed to.’
She smiled encouragingly. And then, to his own surprise Frank found himself telling her about his childhood, his brother and his mother, Mrs Baker, and then the school. He had never talked to anyone about these things the way he talked to Natalia now. Because she listened, and believed him, and didn’t judge. At the end Frank said, ‘I’ve always been afraid, like your brother.’
‘But you had real things to be frightened of,’ Natalia said. ‘My brother was different, he didn’t have any real cause for fear. Not until the war came.’
‘What was he like?’
She smiled. ‘Peter was two years older than me. He had Tartar eyes like mine, but blond hair like our mother, who had German blood. A mixture. A beautiful mixture. A big, noisy boy, always getting into scrapes. But everyone forgave him, because he never meant harm to any living thing. And all the girls loved him.’
Frank frowned slightly. He sounded too good to be real. Natalia caught his look and smiled. ‘It’s true, everyone loved him. I worshipped him. Yet sometimes I would find him standing in a room quite still, looking so afraid. I used to ask him what the matter was and he would say, “Nothing, I was just thinking”. Our mother died just after Peter started university, while I was still at school, and that made him worse.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She had a sudden heart attack. I remember one day after she died going into our sitting room and Peter was standing looking out of the window, his hands clasped together so tightly. He had that frightened look and there were tears in his eyes. I asked what the matter was. He said, “We’re all alone, Natalia. There’s no meaning, no safety. Something can just come out of the blue and destroy us like it did Mother and there’s nothing we can do.” He said, I remember it exactly, “We spend all our lives walking on the thinnest of thin ice, it can break at any moment and then we fall through.” I see him now, standing there, the words rushing out of him, the blue sky outside our window.’ Natalia broke off and smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to distress you.’
‘Thin ice. Yes. I’ve always known about that.’
‘Perhaps we all do. But we all have to go on hoping it won’t break.’ She sighed. ‘Otherwise, like Peter, or your mother, you can go looking for salvation in some mad theory, some pattern to the world that isn’t really there.’
‘What did he believe in?’
‘Communism. He joined the Party just after our mother died. So many people in Europe turned to the Fascists and Communists in those years. Peter became a Communist and he was much happier for a while. He thought he had found the key to history. The Fascists thought they had too, of course, in nationality. Peter finished university, did some painting – he was a painter like me, though a much better one. Before he joined the Party he did some remarkable work, surreal, I think it reflected the confusion in his mind. But later he designed Party posters, square-jawed workers and beautiful maidens waving scythes . . .’ She laughed. ‘Our father was a merchant, he was so angry when Peter became a Communist.’
‘I’ve never really believed in anything,’ Frank said sadly. ‘I just wanted to be left alone.’
‘You believed in science. You worked at a university.’
‘Believed in it? I was interested in it.’ He shook his head. ‘In my old life I worked. I ate. I slept. I read science-fiction magazines and books. I had a flat in Birmingham. I don’t think I’ll see it again.’
‘Peter was living in a science-fiction book called communism,’ Natalia said with sudden bitterness. ‘He thought he saw the future of humanity, its true meaning, in Russia. But then he went there. On an official tour. I had been away studying English, in London.’
‘That’s why you speak it so well.’
She lit another cigarette. ‘I remember when I came back Peter was getting ready for his visit to Moscow, he was full of it, he even said he might emigrate to Russia. But when he got there, being Peter, he wandered off on his own one afternoon, gave the tour guide the slip and went exploring Moscow. The Communists were destroying the old city then, putting up big blocks of flats, bright and white, accommodation for the workers’ future.’
‘They’re starting to build them here, too. The high-rises.’
‘There were some near where Peter was staying, they were new, they hadn’t even laid the pavements yet. Peter told me how he walked over the muddy ground, opened the door of one of the blocks and went inside. He said it was indescribable, filth everywhere, people had been going to the toilet on the floor. The flats were full of families crammed into single rooms, more than one family sometimes, just a tatty curtain to divide them and give some privacy, all swearing and fighting with each other. They screamed abuse at him when he wandered in. And somehow, seeing the inside of that block of flats, seeing how people really lived in his Communist paradise – he was never the same after that.’
Frank thought of Peter stumbling through the mud of that Moscow building site. ‘Poor man,’ he said.
‘Yes. Poor Peter. I don’t know what he expected to find there, a palace?’ Her voice was angry. ‘He got into trouble with the tour people for that. He was lucky he had a foreign passport. That was 1937, during the worst of Stalin’s Great Terror. When Peter came back to Bratislava he left the Party and spent more and more of his time indoors, alone in his room.’