“Books!” a woman’s voice called from outside.
“Yes, please!” Audrey had said, rolling off her bunk. Newspapers weren’t allowed, and she worried her mind had begun to dull, disconnect. There was no intellectual stimulation beyond her conversations with Wen, and the thought of a book thrilled her. The guard had opened the door and a tiny young woman named Hannah entered with a rusty metal cart. She was one of the youngest prisoners, and allegedly a member of the White Rose student protest group in Munich—the distributors of the resistance leaflets. Their leaders had been murdered and the rest imprisoned, but Hannah was so mild that Audrey wondered sometimes whether her arrest had been a mistake.
She and Wen pawed through the two dozen titles, several of which Audrey had already read, then she stopped, smiled, and pulled out a battered copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. After everything that had come after, she never actually finished it at the Kaplans’. She ran her hand over the cover, warmed by its familiarity. Reading it in the Kaplans’ sitting room, she never would have imagined she would finish it in a prison cell. But there was little about her life now that she had imagined. They were all at the centre of a great tempest that tossed them around at will, landing them in places that hardly resembled their previous lives.
“A comedy?” Wen said with a grin. “Not a bad idea.”
Audrey laughed aloud, which felt both wonderful and foreign. “It’s not a comedy,” she said. “I assure you.”
On one scorching afternoon in early September when Audrey and a few others were digging up the last of the season’s potatoes, the guard’s whistle sounded, announcing the end of their shift. Audrey slowly rose from her knees, wiping her dripping brow with the back of her soiled hand. The fingers had healed now, but imperfectly. They no longer hurt, but several were crooked, the knuckles enlarged and bumpy.
The prisoners hadn’t been given enough water or food for this sort of exertion in this heat, and she felt faint. She squinted into the sun, noticed the three guards on duty in the yard were huddled together. One of them gesticulated in anger, and Audrey wondered what the fuss was about, but she knew better than to stare. She took advantage of the moment to slip two potatoes into the pocket of her apron, something she always did when she got the chance.
After loading the last of her potato harvest into the rusted wheelbarrow, she fell in line with the other inmates. The muscles in her arms flexed as she wheeled the load to the kitchen doors at the back of the prison. They bulged beneath her thin flesh, giving the appearance of a ball stuffed into a transparent stocking. She had never had such muscle mass in all her life, yet had never been so weak.
She returned the empty wheelbarrow to the garden shed, then traipsed back to her cell, dirty and exhausted. They were only allowed one bath per week, so she would have to wash as best she could in the shallow basin on the floor. She always thought of Ilse when she washed in the basin, of those first weeks before Müller revealed himself, the indignity she suffered without complaint. She hoped Ilse was still in a position of being able to have a proper hot bath. She hoped to God everything had stayed stable for her and Friedrich. She thought of little else, especially late at night with no work to distract her racing thoughts.
The hall guard unlocked her cell and Audrey entered to find Wen there, on her feet, pacing back and forth.
“You’re back already?” Audrey asked. “I thought—”
“Did you hear?” Wen said, eyes bright.
“Hear what?”
Wen ceased her pacing, glanced at the door as it shut with a clang.
“What?” Audrey pressed.
“The guards are all talking about it,” she said. “We’re finally at war. Britain and France have declared war on Germany.”
It was all anyone could talk about for the next several weeks. As the autumn wore on and the cooler weather moved in, so too did a new sense of excitement among the guards, though it was laced with a tense thread of trepidation. They were now openly discussing the war and there was plenty to overhear, if you knew enough to keep your head down and your ears open. Germany had invaded Poland, and was joined by the Soviets a few weeks later. No one knew what would happen next, only that it seemed clear Hitler had no intention of withdrawing.
Audrey wondered whether the war was the beginning of the end of her tribulation, or would spell the end of everything for everyone. She couldn’t know, of course. No one could. But she thought a little too often about what things might have looked like had they succeeded in killing Hitler in Hanover. She might still have been arrested and sent to prison, but they wouldn’t have been at war. Perhaps Ephraim and Ruth and the other detained Jews would have been released by now. Perhaps, as Ira had hoped, reason would have prevailed.
Perhaps. Though Audrey had come to understand that there were many questions in a person’s life that might just remain unresolved. In some cases, the lack of answers was agonizing. In others, it could be a mercy.
“Where are you?” Wen asked her from the top bunk as they relaxed in their cell after dinner one night in mid-December.
It was a question they often posed one another. They each knew the telltale expression when one disappeared into the past—somewhere they both travelled to often, visiting their lost loved ones and haunting themselves with the ghosts they couldn’t manage to exorcise. For Wen, it was her dead husband, Henrik, and the lost pregnancy before he was killed. And for Audrey, always Berlin. Always Ilse.
“Mail!” A voice boomed from the hall before Audrey could respond to Wen. The tiny window near the top of the cell door slid open and an ivory envelope dropped onto the floor with a flutter like birds’ wings. Footsteps retreated.
“Mail?” Audrey’s brow furrowed. “What?”
She stood in her sock feet, staring at the letter. Ada Jakob’s name and the prison were on the front in handwriting she would know anywhere, but there was no return address. The gold wax seal had been broken.
“What is it?” Wen asked.
With a jolt of electricity Audrey opened the envelope and unfolded the paper, a thick, deluxe gauge. Audrey scanned it, hardly hearing Wen’s continued inquiries. Her hand came to her mouth, and she burst into tears as some great levee in her chest gave way.
“It’s from Ilse,” she choked, looking up at Wen, who had come to her, face full of concern. Wen reached out, and Audrey grasped her cold hand in her own mangled one. “She’s fine. She’s alive. They’re all alive.”
Chapter 36
Audrey
VECHTA, GERMANY | WINTER – SPRING 1945
Audrey took her time walking down the long hall toward the cell she and Wen had shared for the past six years, clutching Ilse’s newest correspondence. She had learned never to rush anywhere if she wasn’t required to by a guard. She had no energy to waste, and nothing of consequence to hurry to.
“Here,” she said to Wen, withdrawing from her apron one of the two raw potatoes she had saved during her kitchen shift. “Dessert.”
She was so sick of potatoes she could have spat, and the prepping and peeling was torture for her hands. But the fact was, without the tubers, the Vechta women might well have just starved to death. As it was, Audrey and Wen were emaciated versions of themselves. Three years into her sentence, Audrey had swapped her original uniform for a set that looked as though it belonged on a child. Her hair had thinned and was starting to fall out. Sometimes she wondered why the Reich didn’t just let them starve and save a whole lot of bother and money. But, she supposed, the prisoners’ deaths would also mean the end of the supply of free labour. They were provided just enough to stay alive.
“Did you get another letter?” Wen asked, biting down gingerly on her potato. The prison diet was causing her teeth to decay, and she’d already lost a few.
Audrey nodded. When she’d received Ilse’s first letter, she’d been shocked that post was allowed in the prison—and that she was permitted to write back. But of course, everything was vetted. Ilse’s letters always arrived open, and sometimes redacted with thick black pen. Ilse was careful anyway: there was never any return name or address, and she deliberately left out any identifying detail, using only initials for Friedrich and Daniel. But Audrey loved the sight of her meticulous, swooping penmanship. The loops of the letters encircled her like a velvet tether, pulling her back toward Ilse.
Audrey wrote back via Aldous’s address, where Friedrich would pick them up. But she edited her own letters too. She couldn’t stand the thought of Ilse knowing how terrible things were for her, and she assumed any negative reports on the living conditions would be tossed into the bin before they even left the prison. She’d stopped asking questions about the war because Ilse’s responses to those never arrived. So she wrote a lot about the many excitements and frivolities of their shared past, the birds she spotted along the tree line near the exercise yard, and peppered Ilse with questions about what was happening at home. She wrote more slowly now, holding the pencil awkwardly to keep her penmanship tidy. She could have dictated to Wen, but wanted Ilse to read words from her own hand as she reached out to her across the divide.
Ilse couldn’t say some things explicitly, but in coded language, she explained that it was Friedrich who had finally tracked down where Audrey was. It had taken him six months. He’d had to be covert, avoid raising suspicion in the aftermath of Audrey’s arrest. He had also withdrawn from direct involvement in organized resistance, though he still looked for opportunities to protect other resisters and cells by misdirecting investigations in counterintelligence. Audrey was grateful that Ilse and Daniel were safer as a result, and it was also a sign of Friedrich’s deepening love for Ilse that he was no longer willing to risk his own imprisonment.
Friedrich and Ilse were living as husband and wife now, and Audrey found her joy for Ilse was only marginally tinted with envy. Ilse was safe and happy, and that’s what mattered. That was what Audrey had traded her own liberty for.
“What does Ilse say?” Wen asked now, patting the spot beside her. Her fingers were thin as twigs. With her parents and husband dead, Wen never received letters, and she looked forward to hearing about Ilse’s life almost as much as Audrey did.
