The inedible bread yesterday, two half-raw potatoes the day before that was all Ursula had in her own stomach. Everything else – for the little it was worth – she’d given to Frieda. But what good would it do Frieda if Ursula were dead? She couldn’t leave her alone in this terrible world.
After the British raid on the zoo they had gone to see if there were any animals they could eat but plenty of people had got there before them. (Could that happen at home? Londoners scavenging in Regent’s Park zoo? Why not?)
They still saw the occasional bird that was clearly not native to Berlin, surviving against the odds, and on one occasion, a cowed, mangy creature that they had taken for a dog before they realized it was a wolf. Frieda was all for trying to take it back to the cellar with them and making a pet of it. Ursula couldn’t even imagine what their elderly neighbour Frau Jaeger’s reaction would have been to that.
Their own apartment was like a dolls’ house, open to the world, all the intimate details of their domestic life on view – beds and sofas, the pictures on the walls, even an ornament or two that had miraculously survived the blast. They had raided anything truly useful but there were still some clothes and a few books and only yesterday she had found a cache of candles beneath a pile of broken crockery. Ursula was hoping to trade them in for medicine for Frieda. There was still a lavatory, in the bathroom, and occasionally, who knew how, there was water. One of them would stand and hold up an old sheet to protect the other’s modesty. Did their modesty matter that much any more?
Ursula had made the decision to move back in. It was cold in the apartment but the air wasn’t fetid and she judged that on balance that would be better for Frieda. They still had blankets and quilts they could wrap themselves in and they shared a mattress on the floor, behind a barricade formed by the dining table and chairs. Ursula’s thoughts strayed constantly to the meals they had eaten at that table, her dreams full of meat, pork and beef, slabs of it grilled and roasted and fried.
The apartment was two floors up and this, combined with the partially blocked staircase, might be enough to put the Russians off. On the other hand they would be the dolls on display in the doll’s house, a woman and a girl ripe for the plucking. Frieda would soon be eleven but if even a tenth of the rumours coming from the east were true then her age wouldn’t save her from the Russians. Frau Jaeger never stopped talking nervously about how the Soviets were raping and murdering their way towards Berlin. There was no wireless any more, just rumour and the occasional flimsy piece of newssheet. The name Nemmersdorf was rarely off Frau Jaeger’s lips (‘A massacre!’). ‘Oh, do shut up,’ Ursula said to her the other day. In English, which she didn’t understand, of course, although she must have heard the unfriendly tone. Frau Jaeger had been visibly startled to be addressed in the language of the enemy and Ursula felt sorry, she was just a frightened old lady, she reminded herself.
The east moved nearer every day. Interest in the western front had long since died, only the east was of concern. The distant thunder of guns now replaced by a constant roar. There was no one to save them. Eighty thousand German troops to defend them against a million and a half Soviets, and most of those German troops seemed to be children or old men. Perhaps poor old Frau Jaeger would be called upon to beat off the enemy with a broom handle. It could only be a matter of days, hours even, before they saw their first Russian.
There was a rumour that Hitler was dead. ‘Not before time,’ Herr Richter said. Ursula remembered the sight of him asleep on his sun lounger on the terrace on the Berg. He had strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage. To what avail? A kind of Armageddon. The death of Europe.
It was life itself, wasn’t it, she corrected herself, that Shakespeare had fretting and strutting. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. They were all walking shadows in Berlin. Life had mattered so much once and now it was the cheapest thing on offer. She spared an idle thought for Eva, she was always blasé about the idea of suicide, had she accompanied her leader into hell?
Frieda was so poorly now, chills and fever and complaining almost constantly of a headache. If she hadn’t been sick they might have joined the exodus of people heading west, away from the Russians, but there was no way she would survive such a journey.
‘I’ve had enough, Mummy,’ she whispered, a terrible echo of the sisters from the attic.
Ursula left her alone while she hurried to the chemist, scrabbling over the debris that littered the streets, occasionally a corpse – she felt nothing for the dead any more. She cowered in doorways when the gunfire seemed too close and then scurried to the next street corner. The chemist was open but he had no medicine, he didn’t even want her precious candles or her money. She came back defeated.
The whole time she had been away from Frieda she had been anxious that something would happen to her in her absence and she promised herself that she wouldn’t leave her side again. She had seen a Russian tank two streets away. She had been terrified by the sight, how much more terrified would Frieda be? The noise of artillery fire was constant. She was gripped by the idea that the world was ending. If it was then Frieda must die in her arms, not alone. But whose arms would she die in? She longed for the safety of her father and the thought of Hugh made the tears start.
By the time she had climbed the rubble staircase she was exhausted, weary to the bone. She found Frieda slipping in and out of delirium and lay down beside her on the mattress on the floor. Stroking her damp hair, she talked in a low voice to her about another world. She told her about the bluebells in spring in the wood near Fox Corner, about the flowers that grew in the meadow beyond the copse – flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. She told her about the smell of new-mown grass from an English summer lawn, the scent of Sylvie’s roses, the sour-sweet taste of the apples in the orchard. She talked of the oak trees in the lane, and the yews in the graveyard and the beech in the garden at Fox Corner. She talked about the foxes, the rabbits, the pheasants, the hares, the cows and the big plough horses. About the sun beaming his friendly rays on fields of corn and fields of green. The bright song of the blackbird, the lyrical lark, the soft coo of the wood pigeons, the hoot of the owl in the dark. ‘Take this,’ she said, putting the pill in Frieda’s mouth, ‘I got it from the chemist, it will help you sleep.’
She told Frieda how she would walk on knives to protect her, burn in the flames of hell to save her, drown in the deepest of waters if it would buoy her up and how she would do this one last thing for her, the most difficult thing of all.
She put her arms around her daughter and kissed her and murmured in her ear, telling her about Teddy when he was little, his surprise birthday party, about how clever Pamela was and how annoying Maurice was and how funny Jimmy had been when he was small. How the clock ticked in the hall and the wind rattled in the chimneypots and how on Christmas Eve they lit an enormous log fire and hung their stockings from the mantelpiece and next day ate roast goose and plum pudding and how that was what they would all do next Christmas, all of them together. ‘Everything is going to be all right now,’ Ursula told her.
When she was sure that Frieda was asleep she took the little glass capsule that the chemist had given her and placed it gently in Frieda’s mouth and pressed her delicate jaws together. The capsule broke with a tiny crunching noise. A line from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets came into mind as she bit down on her own little glass vial. I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday. She held tightly on to Frieda and soon they were both wrapped in the velvet wings of the black bat and this life was already unreal and gone.