The secret history of au.., p.1
The Secret History of Audrey James, page 1
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For my family
My dream enablers, my cheer squad, my joy.
Prologue
VLAGTWEDDE, NETHERLANDS | APRIL 1945
The soldiers are sitting outside playing cards when they notice the woman staggering down the street.
The small Dutch border town they recently liberated from the Germans is quiet on this spring afternoon, and the soldiers have settled themselves in a circle using cargo boxes as makeshift chairs and tables in the absence of any real furniture. Canteens rest on the dusty ground at their feet whilst the sun shines on the tips of their ears and the backs of their necks, the same sun that warmed their skin back home.
These five soldiers are part of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, a proud contingent of the province’s best and bravest young lads. Or at least, what’s left of the contingent. They’ve lost many men along the way, the boys they grew up with, went to school with. Their mothers belong to the same quilting circles and church bazaar committees. Their fathers go fishing out on the flashing bays of the Atlantic where they smoke cigars and avoid discussions of the last war, burying the appalling realities that they didn’t dare reveal to their own sons. They watched, tight-throated and helpless as their boys shipped out in crisp new uniforms, drunk on the dangerous youthful delusion of invincibility that they themselves once felt.
The young soldiers think of their families now as they run their tongues over their teeth. Each man considers the hand he’s been dealt.
One craves his mother’s fresh-squeezed lemonade. Another longs for the touch of his girl’s warm hand on his arm, and hopes that she’ll be waiting when he returns. And each man wants to win this card game so that he can line his threadbare pockets with cigarettes. They welcome the burning, dry heat in their lungs on cold evenings, a reminder that they are still alive and breathing where other, less fortunate men are rotting in a constellation of unmarked graves in France.
When they hear a scratch in the dirt on the deserted road, the soldiers’ heads snap up. Their eyes squint into the light for the source of the sound. They’re always on high alert, even though they’ve taken Holland from the Nazis. A soldier can never be too careful.
But it’s only a woman on the road. No threat.
As she shuffles closer, they see her dress is torn, her blond hair disheveled. She is missing a shoe.
One of the soldiers drops his cards and jogs toward her, reaching her just as her knees give way. He catches the woman and lowers her to the ground, shouts to his comrades to fetch the medic. Her bare foot is bleeding and badly bruised. Her face is dirty, lips cracked and dry. Her blond hair reminds him of his little sister’s, and in that moment, he just wants to go home.
He calls for water and a canteen is thrust into his hand. “Drink,” he tells the woman. “If you can.”
Her grey-blue eyes grow wide and she grips his hand. “English!” she whispers.
The soldier nods. “Canadian.”
She tries to take the canteen, but her fingers tremble violently. The soldier rests it against her lips and tips some water into her parched mouth. She splutters at first, then gulps it down. When she finishes, a drop slips down her chin. The soldier wipes it away, revealing pale skin beneath the layer of grime.
“What’s your name, love?” he asks.
The medic arrives and squats down. He shines a bright light into her eyes, and her chest tightens like a rubber band. She fights against the memory of the searchlights. The fire.
The medic takes her wrist and presses his fingers down to locate her weak pulse. “What’s your name, miss?”
“Audrey,” she says, her raspy voice a little louder this time. “Audrey James.”
PART I
In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
—Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Chapter 1 Audrey
BERLIN, GERMANY | OCTOBER 1938
Your tempo is off today, Fräulein James.”
From her seat on the gleaming black bench in front of the conservatory’s second-best grand piano, Audrey James bit down on her bottom lip, which was normally painted a deep crimson that set off her grey eyes in the style of the American film starlets. But she had been in a hurry to get to her lesson this morning and left the house without completing all her typical ablutions. Frankly, she was lucky to have smoothed the wrinkles in her dress and unwound the curlers in her hair in time to catch the bus across town to the konservatorium. She ran out of time for the lipstick.
“Yes, Herr Fogel, I apologize,” she said, straightening her posture and resetting her fingers on the ivory. “I will try again.”
The mood in the home of her best friend, Ilse Kaplan, where she lived as a long-term guest, had been strained of late, and the tension was affecting Audrey’s typically sanguine disposition. Two weeks prior, Ilse’s younger brother Ephraim had been attacked by a gang of Hitler Youth on his way home from school. Audrey had seen them around the city, those miniature versions of the Nazis. They’d beaten him badly; he’d needed stitches in two different places on his face, and his black eye was only now beginning to yellow.
Keeping her back and neck as straight as an oak trunk, Audrey closed her eyes and let her fingers dance across the white and black keys, hearing her way into the correct tempo. She’d been working on Wagner’s Sonata in A Major for several weeks in preparation for her graduation recital in December. It was one of the most complicated, furious pieces she’d ever undertaken to learn, but the effort required would render the mastery of it even more delicious. She had wanted to prepare Mendelssohn’s Number 2, but Mendelssohn was a Jewish composer. Wagner was the darling of the Reich—and Herr Fogel.
“There we are,” Herr Fogel muttered.
Several minutes later, Audrey finished, the last note lingering in her ear long after it dissipated. She always loved that moment. She opened her eyes, blinking into the golden autumn light streaming through the large windows of the airy conservatory space that overlooked the quiet Bernburgerstrasse.
“Better. Better,” her professor said, adjusting his wire spectacles. “But watch your progressions in the middle of the second movement. I shall see you on Friday, Fräulein James. Good day to you. Heil Hitler.”
“Thank you, Herr Fogel, good day,” Audrey said. He eyed her, waiting. It was the same look with which he fixed her at every lesson, in anticipation of her first note. Expectant. Relief when she delivered. “Heil Hi tler,” she added.
When he left the room, Audrey allowed herself to slouch a fraction, releasing the tension in her spine and shoulders. A person could feel the weight of the Third Reich. Even a non-Jew who was not personally impacted by their stringent policies could feel the pressure of what the Nazi Party was doing to the country. These days, one was expected to salute the Führer. At the grocer, the chemist’s. When the postman delivered a parcel. It had become the standard greeting for all Germans, replacing genuine geniality with a thinly veiled trial as they tested one another into declarations of allegiance. Because all it took to bring someone down in this Germany was a question mark.
Audrey carefully tucked her music sheets into her satchel (Herr Fogel did not abide crumpled pages), pulled on her coat and gloves, and made her way down the marble staircase to the first floor. As she passed another classroom, a cello strung a haunting tune. She stopped in the foyer and fished a tube of red lipstick out of her bag, slicking it on with a rebellious flare. Painted faces were not the ideal. Hitler preferred women’s faces fresh. No trickery of appearance, no allure or drama. No excitement or individuality at all.
When she opened the door to the street, her father’s most recent letter, two weeks before, came back to her. He had all but demanded she return to England immediately.
I know you wish to finish your studies, but Germany is no longer safe, and I fear the borders will close. You must return to England before Hitler makes it impossible for you to do so.
She had been living with the Kaplans since she began her three-year program at the conservatory, but Germany had always been her home, as it had been her mother Helene’s. She’d met Audrey’s father, Victor, an Englishman, in Germany during the Great War. A solicitor by trade, he had flown a reconnaissance plane for the Brits, shuttling back and forth between France, England, and the Eastern Front to gather aerial photography of the enemy’s encampments and armaments. In the fall of 1917, his plane malfunctioned and he crash-landed just outside of Brandenburg, near Helene’s family home. She and her mother put themselves at risk to shelter and nurse Victor back to health. They fell in love, and Helene became pregnant. Audrey knew her father must have been mad about her mother; only a love like that could have caused him to marry Helene and stay in Germany after the war was over. It would have been a love story for the ages, but Helene died of complications from Audrey’s birth.
Victor was devastated by his wife’s death, and never remarried, but stayed in Berlin to continue to grow his fledgling legal practice and fulfill his promise to Helene to support her aging mother. With no time or knowledge of how to raise an infant on his own, he hired a wet nurse to care for Audrey in her infancy, followed by a nanny, Sophie. She was a kind woman who clapped and cheered when Audrey put on little theatricals in the attic, asked her about the books she read and what she was learning in school. Sophie was Audrey’s best friend until Ilse swept into her life like a warm August wind when she was seven years old.
Audrey had been watching from her window as furniture and crates were stacked on the pavement outside the house across the street, curious as to who was moving in. Then she saw a girl her age with soft eyes and braided brown hair who’d waved, smiling in a way the girls at Audrey’s school never did. Without hesitation, Audrey had marched over the street to ask to be her friend whilst Sophie hustled along in her wake, apologizing to the Kaplans for the intrusion.
Audrey was spunky but mostly friendless, and Ilse was a good listener with a heart that spoke to Audrey’s in all the ways she needed, showing her that she was, indeed, loveable. Sophie was caring, but she was paid to watch over Audrey, and her father was distant and formal in his interactions. Nothing was ever explicitly said, but Audrey knew he held her responsible for Helene’s death, and it didn’t help that Audrey so closely resembled her mother. A portrait hung on the wall above the fireplace in the sitting room, and though Audrey was never invited into her father’s bedroom, she’d once glimpsed several gilded-framed photographs of her mother on the walls before he closed the door, shutting her out of his sanctuary of grief. He never understood that she was grieving, too, for the loss of the mother she never got to have, and the loss of the father who blamed her for it. But Ilse had let her in, and Audrey found a family in the Kaplans, who welcomed her at any hour of the day.
Each summer, Victor returned to England and brought Audrey with him. He hosted his London friends and his sister Minna at their holiday home in Kensington, and took Audrey to the symphony and shows in the West End. Arts were their shared interest, and the only real connection Audrey felt was when they bonded in these moments. But all the while, Audrey counted down the days until September, when she would be back in Berlin with Ilse.
Then, five years ago, Helene’s mother died, and Victor determined it was time for them to sell the Berlin house and live full-time in London. His English roots ran deeper than the earth’s core, but England had never felt like home for Audrey. Home was Berlin, and home was with Ilse, the sister she’d never had and the one person she couldn’t live without. Heated arguments had ensued, but with his promise to his late wife fulfilled, Audrey thought he’d finally just come to a point where he couldn’t live in Berlin with Helene’s ghost anymore. He had no reason to stay, and plenty of reasons to run.
When Victor announced their plans, Audrey’s nanny had resigned, saying Audrey was well on her way to becoming a fine young woman and no longer needed her. Sophie’s sister was also leaving Berlin, and Sophie decided to join her.
“We’re getting out whilst we can,” Sophie had told Audrey before she left. Her brother-in-law was political and deeply concerned about Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. “Eli has job prospects in Brussels, and I figure I can find a family in need of service, anywhere I go.”
Audrey tried to be strong when Sophie left, and she summoned that strength once more on the day she herself departed for London. She and Ilse held each other outside Audrey’s house in a clutch of despair.
“I shall be lost without you,” Ilse said, her voice thick. “Especially if things get worse. You’ve always been my shield.”
Over her shoulder, Audrey spied the house down the street where an awful boy named Karl once lived. He and one of his mates had cornered Ilse when the girls were about ten years old, hurling insults like jagged rocks. Audrey placed herself between them and Ilse, but it was a trap; a third bully crept up from behind and cut off Ilse’s long braid with his mother’s kitchen shears. The boys had cackled harshly, throwing the braid at her feet and spitting on it. Ilse fled home sobbing. Audrey screamed at the boy, knocked the shears from his hand, and kicked him as hard as she could in both shins. She made sure he was also reduced to tears before she sprinted away after Ilse.
Tears slipped down Audrey’s cheeks now even as she brushed Ilse’s away. “No,” she said, with a sad smile. “I’m not your shield. I’m just the sword.” Ilse laughed despite herself. “I know you’ll be fine,” Audrey continued. “You’re stronger than you think. Besides, your biggest pest is going to be Ephraim, now, anyway.”
Ilse chuckled as they pulled away.
“You must promise to write every other week,” Audrey said. “And so will I.”
“Mama says maybe we can come visit someday,” Ilse added, hopeful. Her glossy dark hair shone in the morning sunlight.
“And I’ll make my father bring me back soon,” Audrey said. “I’ll find a way. I’ll insist.”
“I know you will,” Ilse said with a watery laugh.
For the next two years, Audrey distracted herself with studying acting and music alongside her finishing school classes in London, but her heart was in Berlin. So, in secret, she applied to the premiere konservatorium. It was a prestigious school, but Audrey had guessed—correctly, as it transpired—that her father’s soft spot for her artistic interests might be the ticket back to Berlin, and to Ilse. He agreed to let her return to the continent to attend the conservatory, so long as Ilse’s mother Ruth, a woman of profound caution, kept a watchful eye on her.
But now, her father wanted her back safely in England. Audrey knew, on a level, that he had a point. The attack on Ephraim wasn’t an isolated incident. It was indicative of the climate, the hatred of Jews and anyone who didn’t fit the Nazis’ own definition of who was a “good” or “real” German. But she wasn’t about to waste three years of her time, dedication, and her father’s money by abandoning her program so close to the finish. She’d written back, reminding him that her graduation was only a few weeks away, and she would return then.
