All the Beautiful Liars E-Book

Sylvia Petter

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 349

Beschreibung

'Explores truth and memory with a compelling subtlety' – Jason GoodwinThe fictional memoir of Katrina Klain.How true are the family histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much All the Beautiful Liars have embargoed or embellished the truth?During a long flight from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her true origins. This has already taken her to Vienna, where she met her Uncle Harald who embezzled the Austrian government out of millions, as well as Carl Sokorny, the godson of one of Hitler's most notorious generals, and then on to Geneva and Madrid. Not only were her family caught up with the Nazis, they also turn out to have been involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany.It's a lot to come to terms with, but there are more revelations in store. After the funeral, she finds letters that reveal a dramatic twist which means her own identity must take a radical shift. Will these discoveries enable her to complete the puzzle of her family's past?Inspired by her own life story, Sylvia Petter's richly imaginative debut novel, set between the new world and the old, is a powerful tale about making peace with the past and finding closure for the future.

Leseprobe

How true are the family histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much all the beautiful liars have embargoed or embellished the truth?

During a long flight from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her true origins. This has already taken her to Vienna, where she met her Uncle Harald who embezzled the Austrian government out of millions, as well as Carl Sokorny, the godson of one of Hitler’s most notorious generals, and then on to Geneva and Madrid. Not only were her family caught up with the Nazis, they also turn out to have been involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany.

It’s a lot to come to terms with, but there are more revelations in store. After the funeral, she finds letters that reveal a dramatic twist which means her own identity must take a radical shift. Will these discoveries enable her to complete the puzzle of her family’s past?

Inspired by her own life story, Sylvia Petter’s richly imaginative debut novel, set between the new world and the old, is a powerful tale about making peace with the past and finding closure for the future.

Published in 2020

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

Copyright © Sylvia Petter 2020

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 9781785632044

To Margaret Kennedyin appreciation of years of support and encouragement

– cocoons of wordsthat lived in our chests but did not flyto our lips

– ‘Those Things We Do Not Say’, Angela Readman

All I have written here is true; except the lies

– Famous Last Words, Timothy Findley

Contents

Part OneInflight Panopticon I

Part TwoInflight Panopticon II

Part ThreeInflight Panopticon III

Part FourInflight Panopticon IV

Part FiveLandings

A note of thanks

About the author

Dear Editor, and, I hope, dear Reader,

A 20-hour voyage to the other side of the world to bury the last remaining member of your family can play havoc with the mind. Sleep dreams are shaken by film snips and time-travelling memory blasts of sometimes wishful thinking…and you might even find yourself becoming a ‘person of interest’ in the Panopticon of a lonesome tabloid hack.

The journey is long and so, in your mind, you write, write, write; you must complete and deliver your story if it is to be read, and if you are to escape from that Panopticon to pursue your quest on landing. For how do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from?

You may also find that the telephone that rings three times has changed from a tolling bell into a new chance, and that your inflight experience has prepared you for facing the reality that will confront you on arrival. Forgive me if I include you in my adventure; it is, after all, a fictional memoir, where silence recounts ‘true’ stories as fictions, and truths can finally be told.

So if your interest is piqued, do take my hand and enter with me the Panopticon of All the Beautiful Liars, where we shall transform the last chance into a new reality.

Sincerely, Katrina Klain

Part OneInflight Panopticon I

Chapter 1

I am Jaimie, Jaimie Stadler, the keeper of lost endings. A life in Limbo is my lot: the price I must pay for my worldly delving into the tales of others, their scandals and secrets.

My job entails servicing The Panopticon in that period between death and the rest of the journey to God knows where. God, perhaps, may not even know where; and none, I am told, have come back to give the exact coordinates.

I may be new at this game, but I have work to do. Not that such work is evident, but there is a certain amount of opening doors, and closing them, pressing the play button – I am not always responsible for the stop button – and providing a fresh cup of tea, or glass of brandy.

Ah, someone is knocking at the door. I must release the lock and let them enter. But first let me click the play button so that you see what my visitor was going through. It is a woman of late middle age. I shall put the kettle on.

Click.

Labelled already?

Name & origin:

Katrina Klain, Australian citizen

Location:

Morgue of the Medical Insititute of the university of Vienna

Cause of death:

slit throat

What a clean sweep. And such neat stitching. The human head, it is documented, remains conscious for ninety seconds after decapitation (footnote 1: Severance by Robert Olen Butler, an American writer). But that is the view from the other side.

In fact, it can take days, even weeks, before beginning the journey down that tunnel of which one speaks. Not many get to the light, I might add, most end up wandering the corridors, the proverbial loose end having slipped from their grasp. But some are curious by nature. My guest, I suspect, is one of these. Let us then move into her mind. I always find that letting the ‘interviewee’ speak can liven up even the deadest reportage. (Do excuse my little joke.) So, over to Katrina Klain for a first-person account of the situation.

Shoot. Or should I say, cut?

Cut. My throat was cut! But when the blade slit through and I asked ‘Why now?’ I realised that I still had some unfinished business. I must find the story. It is not just my story, it’s my family’s, too, or what I can make of it. We must have been a family of liars, making up everything.

Except the bits that are true.

They say there’s a light at the end of a tunnel. Warm, fuzzy, strangely welcoming. But I’ve learned not to believe what they say. It’s not that they lie. I can see through lies. It’s all the things they don’t tell you. All the things you can’t tell.

I didn’t go down the path straightaway. But I saw a light flickering just after they wiped away the blood and pulled out the pipe. It got a little stronger when they brought me to the morgue to await the next step. It is quite pleasant lying here under the sheet, nothing to do, nothing to say, just remembering. My mother had lain the same way in a morgue in Australia except that her throat had been intact. I’d stroked her cheek and kissed her forehead; and I’d whispered, ‘my beautiful liar’. The words surprised me then, and they haunted me for the rest of my life.

So this is Katrina Klain. Quite short. A metre and a half, I would say. Well-proportioned with the beginnings of an embonpoint. Little grey in that short hair. A straight nose. Not unattractive for a corpse. Let me look at her file.

Ah, it says that she was the daughter of Bettina and Alfred, who brought her to Australia from Vienna in the early ’50s.

It is interesting that her question was neither, ‘Why?’ nor ‘Why me?, but ‘Why now?’ which is perhaps an uncommon spin when one seeks reasons for gratuitous actions.

Her story cannot be a memoir. Even I could not presume to ghost-write such a thing. There are too many holes. Big holes of silence. And there are dreams, some coming from nowhere, yet they also become a part of the puzzle. What can one do if there are just bits and pieces to go on, held together with slipstitches, and a rosette here and there, to make them look almost beautiful? I, too, can add my – how do you say? – two cents’ worth, although two is an unsightly number, the way it curls and drifts off. Sometimes into memories.

Memories. The bits one feels and the bits one is told, and they all come together as snapshots in one’s mind. Some are lost, and some become parts of someone else’s memories. And some bits just disappear and one ends up looking for them for the rest of one’s life – even beyond it. And so they become part of an unfinished business; a business that can only be settled with the help of Yours Truly.

The light Katrina Klain saw was not from the end of a tunnel, but from a side passageway. It was not fuzzy or welcoming, but an open, matter-of-fact sort of light, like a 60-watt bulb, although there were no lamps. She got up and took one of the green gowns hanging on a peg on the wall, slipped it on, opened the morgue door and walked out. Drawn by the light, she came to my door. The plaque said: The Last Chance.

She had to take it.

Chapter 2

Katrina Klain pushes the door open and stands agape in green hospital scrubs. The room is round, and there are no windows. A large television screen covers a segment of the wall in a home-cinema curve; a large high-backed couch upholstered in brown velvet faces the screen. The only other furniture is an armchair in the same brown, in the corner next to a Biedermeier side table.

A small loudspeaker box – a little like the one with the dog – from where my voice will emanate, stands on the table. Katrina takes tentative steps towards the armchair and, with a hand on the table to steady herself, sits down. She sees the exercise book next to the speaker box and traces a finger over the childlike handwriting on the cover: The Rules.

More rules. Even after death?

There would have to be, of course. Even Lucifer needed some sort of middle managers in Hell.

‘Welcome to The Last Chance,’ I say.

That is what I always say. Of course they wonder where they are. This one is different. I could tell. She is unable even to utter a word, and her hands tremble, but I can see a will there. Hmm. The others hardly had any left by the time they came through the door. They just gave up. That, of course, made it much easier for me to pack them off to the archives to languish forever with their unfinished stories. I would have to try another – how do you say? – tack?

‘Just call me Jaimie,’ I say. I pronounce the ‘J’ quite forcefully so that my name comes out as ‘Tchaimie’. I try some French. ‘A sweet name, n’est-ce pas? Bittersweet.’

She looks around. Stares at the box. Says nothing.

I must admit that I am surprised at her reaction. She, of course, does not know what to expect, and it is quite natural for me to presume she is wondering where she is. Old habits die hard. A legacy from my tabloid hack life: presuming for the sake of finishing the story. I should have known, of course. I mean, I can read her mind. The facts are there. It is me she is wondering about.

She rubs her forehead. Her head starts to throb. Pain after death? She stands up. Her knees tremble. She has to sit down. Not here. The couch? I cough. The loudspeaker crackles. She thinks she is dreaming. Dreaming in death?

She spirals slowly towards the couch. Grips its high back with both hands. ‘Who are you?’ she says, breathing the ‘you’.

‘I am dead, just like you, Katrina. Like you, I am also quite newly dead, but I have a mission. I am the keeper of this place where you might take your last chance. I see you are wondering about where you are.’

I press the switch. Click. The screen snows zigzags.

She looks at the screen. She turns and listens for sound from the loudspeaker. She looks for cameras. There are none. Oh shit. Play this cool, she thinks. Ha! She pulls back her shoulders, strides to the front of the couch, and sits down as if she has been invited to make herself comfortable.

‘Yes. Do make yourself comfortable,’ I say. ‘It will be a long ride.’

She leans back in the couch. My accent? Yes! Schwarzenegger characters jostle through her mind: Terminator, Barbarian. She shudders and sits up straight. Kindergarten Cop? Let it be Kindergarten Cop.

Arnold Schwarzenegger? Peleeease! I have studied journalism at the University of Vienna, and have even spent six months in London. I do not have an accent! Ah, of course, the Mr Austria semi-finals when I was 18. Perhaps that comes through in my voice. I may have been a hack, but I was a damned attractive one, if I do say so myself. Hmm. It is perhaps a pity that she cannot see me.

The pitch is higher than I intend. I pause and drop the timbre. ‘No, I am not Arnie, although I might meet him one day.’ I pause for gravity. ‘I am the keeper of lost endings.’

She stares at the screen. Sees just the snow. Then looks at the loudspeaker on the table.

Click.

She looks back at the screen. A banner appears: Have you seen the rules?

So what are these Rules? Know them and break them is what life taught me. But life has gone now and we are in this intermediary annexe, not unlike those bays for emergency in a long tunnel: under the Mont Blanc or the Arlberg, or perhaps even beneath the Great Wall of China.

Katrina gets up and goes to the table. She opens the exercise book.

Rule 1: Tie up all your loose ends.

‘It is really the main one,’ I say.

Her hands tremble. She wills them still. Shuts the book and goes back to the couch.

‘A cup of tea?’ I ask.

Her eyes are wide and her lips take on a quizzical bend. She straightens on the couch. She thinks she must be careful with her thoughts. She suspects that I can read her mind. My God, she thinks, if this is limbo, what’s hell like?

‘There is no hell, Katrina. It is not a matter of good and bad. There is only here and the hereafter. A much better binary.’

‘But you can read my mind.’ There’s nowhere to go, even in my thoughts?

‘It has always been like that, Katrina. You just did not notice, or did not want to.’

‘What do you mean?’ She looks at the screen, then at the loudspeaker box. She purses her lips.

I pause before I say: ‘Data retention, Big Brother, or, closer to home, NSA, Five Eyes. Ring a bell?’

Bells have been ringing in her head, it seems, since she walked through the door of The Last Chance. ‘So if you know everything, what’s your interest in me?’ she says and pulls at her earlobe.

‘Ah, but I do not know everything. I only know from those who have died whose stories are buried forever in my archives.’

And, of course, there is the material that has just checked in, much of her own…shall we say…patchwork.

She stares at the loudspeaker box from where my voice emanates. ‘What time is it?’

She had me. She had not thought why herself yet, so there was nothing for me to read in her mind.

‘I could do with a drink,’ she says, stretching her legs out before her and surveying her ankles.

Nice ankles. I do not answer. She thinks she has me flummoxed. I do not get flummoxed. I did not in my other life, and I will certainly not get so now.

She crosses her legs leisurely. Spontaneous thought. That was the answer. Don’t give him time.

‘Time, my dear Katrina, is something you need to worry about,’ I say in a measured tone.

‘You don’t scare me,’ she says.

‘It is not about scaring you. It is about the rules. There are only two, anyway. But did you read them?’

‘I only saw something about loose ends.’

That pursing of lips again. Headstrong? ‘Something?’ Make her find the answer.

‘Tying them up.’

Ha! But is she sulking now? ‘I must say that that book is a bit of a joke, since people always want rules.’ My voice slips into hypnotic mode. ‘But, nevertheless, it is there in case of need. And in your case there is need. You want to know. Do you not?’

Her eyes close. It is working. ‘We are situated in a variable time zone. Some never knock on the door and are destined to roam the corridors in search of a glow that remains little more than an eternal refracted light-play. They may see it as a never-ending Son et Lumière, sometimes without the sound. Some may enter, but then give up. Others may take that last chance. You did.’

Click.

‘Where were you just now, Katrina?’

I scratched the itch of a familiar sadistic streak running down my back – old habits and all that – but some of the players in Katrina’s story are not wholly unfamiliar to me.

‘Shall we start with Bettina?’

Here is her chance to hear more about her mother, Bettina Klain. She nods.

I remember Mum saying how it was better to know nothing, better that than watching yourself fall apart, one sense at a time. First it was her sense of smell, then taste – the two are really one – then hearing and sight. Touch was still there to pick up her marbles, she’d say. She’d been lucky. Had a long life. What hadn’t she known?

‘Not so easy, Katrina.’ I am in my element as I turn invisible screws on her thumbs. ‘What was the last thing you spoke to her about?’

She has nowhere else to go, so leans back in the couch and stares at the screen. Is that a glare in her eyes?

(For my ‘to do’ list: get her out of those awful hospital scrubs.)

Click.

Chapter 3

Katrina Klain

2009. Geneva. The phone rang three times. I’d picked it up.

‘Your mother has had a massive stroke. She is alive, technically. We need your permission to remove the breathing tube.’ The accent was broadly Australian.

I’d left my contact number with the home on Sydney’s upper North Shore. In Europe? they’d asked. I can be there in thirty-six hours, I’d said. It’s not as if I lived in the Never-Never.

Now all I had were memories, and a long, painful flight to Australia to bury a woman I perhaps never knew. To bury my mother, Bettina Klain.

* * *

I boarded the Qantas flight at Heathrow and settled into a window seat near the rear of the plane. They say that’s where you’re more likely to survive. Snort. Survival was what it was always about. We just get lazy. Forget. Give up or just plain get tired of it all.

I hadn’t slept since the phone call the day before, stayed up to get the early flight from Geneva to London, cross town and then wait at Heathrow for flight QF 002. In the toilets I jabbed my belly with the syringe weeping my anti-blood clot shot and carefully placed the rubber nozzle back over the needle before dropping it into the bin for used pads. The last of the druggies. Ha! Every seven hours my doctor had said. Next loo stop was Singapore. No way could I go on the plane. Don’t forget the support stockings, he’d said. I hated the support stockings that never wanted to stay up on the long lug walking to boarding. I hitched through the fabric of my light linen pants at the elastic stay-ups.

A Bloody Mary, my favourite on flights, a bit of a film. Schwarzenegger oldies came up three times. No blood and guts, please. Kindergarten Cop. Yes. Something funny. Arnie never could disguise his Austrian accent. He was home more often now that he’d given up on politics and his wife had given up on him. So much giving up, all round. I just couldn’t yet. But what did I have? I thought of the last time I’d spoken to Mum just before getting her into the home, six months earlier. I’d been shocked. Angry.

‘I am reminded of Nazi Germany,’ she’d said.

‘Mum!’

‘Just look at the TV. This time it is to put up a fence around the pool so that toddlers cannot fall in and drown.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘There are no toddlers anywhere near our house.’

‘But there could be.’

She shook her head. ‘It is more than that. The government is taking away our own sense of responsibility. It wants to control everything.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Warnings on television about this and that? We are living in a nanny state. I know where that leads.’ She turned her head. ‘Disempowering citizens. Making sheep of us all.’

‘That was another time, Mum. Another place. Not Australia.’

‘I am an old woman,’ she said. ‘I am glad that I do not have to live through it all again.’

I remember stroking her fingers, gnarled from years of arthritis.

Memories. The bits you feel and the bits you’re told. They can haunt your dreams and become stories that ghosts tell. Some bits disappear and you end up looking for them for the rest of your life.

The stewardess poured tomato juice over crushed ice.

‘Lemon please.’ She nodded as she handed me a plastic cup and a small plastic bottle of vodka over the two empty seats by my side. I’d been lucky. All alone by the window. I’d been able to put my feet up in cattle class. I leaned back, put on my earphones and clicked on a video channel. Maybe I’d be able to sleep now.

Click.

The film started.

*

Indeed it has, Katrina.

It’s just a film, Jaimie.

Do you really think so? We shall see.

Chapter 4

Bettina Klain

1921. Gorenzen, Thuringia. A small town in Germany.

I am Bettina Klain, née Strasser. I am the youngest of thirteen of whom two died even younger than my four years. My parents and siblings are out in the fields. I am alone. I run to my favourite tree, a tall elm behind the back of the barn where the sheep are kept through the long winter. There is a hollow in the tree that I can just reach. That is where I hide my treasures: two bits of brown glass from a bottle of malt beer my brother, Alvin, had inadvertently dropped on the rough stone kitchen floor. The bottle had been empty, but it was an accident my family could little afford. My mother collected all the pieces of glass to use for re-melting. All, save two tiny triangles. I spied them in a dark corner and secretly made them mine. I hold them up in the sunlight and feel a tiny thrill. I can make the brown earth glow.

Other treasures are the odd strands of flax that have fallen from my mother’s spinning. I make a nest of the strands to cradle my glass jewels. Then there is a folded page carefully extracted from an old copy of my father’s Bauernalmanach, the only reading material in the household and dedicated to farmers of the region. At first, I was drawn to the pictures of dancing.

Later, when I was able to read, I devoured the serials – stories of forbidden passion to enliven the hearts of the farmers’ wives – ignored by my father. These, though, I did not extract, but after reading, replaced each issue carefully in order in the pile.

I learned early to keep secrets and to stay silent. Silence became my way of navigating the telling or not of what were considered to be lies.

When I spoke, however, I would embroider things in my mind, breathing life and excitement into stories of what was in fact a difficult farm life in that period following the loss of a war. ‘You have to learn, Bettina,’ my mother would say. ‘Learn the land for a husband.’ I would nod and close my eyes. A prince would come, and he would take me over a sea to a land where the earth glowed like gold.

But the land in Gorenzen was dry from a lack of rain. It was a time of hardship. A year earlier, my father and brothers had buried the greater part of the potato harvest deep in the ground to hide it from straggling marauders spawned by the defeat of a nation. The whole family would pee into buckets kept in the barn to be used in the spring to scour the fleeces of the twenty head of sheep kept inside over the harsh winters. Electricity had just come to Gorenzen, but Father monitored the one light switch. Electric light was too expensive to be wasted on women’s work like darning and spinning. I did not mind. I loved sitting outside in the summer with my mother and sisters as they spun wool and flax in the moonlight. Summer evenings were dream times.

On the morning of my fifteenth birthday my mother said: ‘So fortunate you are.’ She had placed a small vase of field daisies next to my bread and butter plate. Her gift was the news that cousin Hildegard had agreed to take me on as a ‘maid’. ‘They have a big house in Mansfeld and you will have work. Hildegard has married well. That side of the family has always moved in good circles.’

Early spring 1934, each day, after the dusting and the tidying, the mopping, the washing of windows as needed, and the buffing of the silverware, I would withdraw to my room at the back of cousin Hildegard’s two-storey house to work on my wedding dress. Gunmetal grey was not ideal, but the silky sheen of the rayon left over from Hildegard’s curtains would make for a special outfit. Hildegard had allowed me to sew the straight seams on her Veritas sewing machine, but the rest, she said, had to be done by hand. I suspect Hildegard was fearful that I might damage the contraption when it came to the setting-in of sleeves, although the racing sound of the clickety-click did have the advantage of alerting her to the completion of my duties.

I, too, will move in good circles. I hung the long-sleeved dress with the dropped waist on a wooden coat hanger and hitched it onto a brass hook on the back of the door to my room. Just the hem left. The wedding was to be the next week. I could not wait. I could not wait to leave Hildegard’s house after almost three years of being little more than a servant, hearing that as an uneducated farm girl I could not hope to expect more, and that as it stood, I was already lucky. But I did expect more, so much more.

And when I met Heinrich Rippenstein at a midsummer dance in my home village of Gorenzen, I knew there would be more than the life of a farm girl, a servant, destined to be married off to work her fingers to the bone and bear hordes of children like the ones my old mother had borne before I came along at number thirteen. I knew it from the moment he came towards me and asked if we might waltz. He looked very smart in his grey uniform with the high shiny boots. He would come to Mansfeld, he promised. We might stroll one evening.

And we strolled, and we danced. And I knew that my life was about to change. I could not wait to be with Heinrich in our little cottage reserved for him as an officer of the leftover army of the Weimar Republic.

Change was in the air, with a young, dashing politician promising a better life after years of inflation. But change also came in the form of a telegram delivered to Hildegard’s home.

‘It is addressed to you,’ Hildegard said.

‘Give it to me,’ I said as my cousin held it an instant longer in her hand.

‘Bad news?’ she said. ‘Telegrams are always bad news.’

I turned my back and with trembling fingers opened the telegram. Words jumped out at me: regret to inform you...unfortunate...death.

Heinrich was dead. He had fallen from his horse during manoeuvres and broken his neck. I repeated the words and dropped to my knees, my head almost touching the floor, as if my body could form a shell into which I might crawl. Hildegard stretched out a hand, then withdrew and left the room. Of course, I was devastated. My world crashed.

*

Click.

‘That’s enough for the moment,’ I say. ‘Have a cup of tea. You’ll need something stronger a bit later.’ I see that Katrina is agitated. She had not seen anyone bring tea, but there is a steaming cup on the table next to the exercise book. She puts out her hand. Stops. Stands up.

A cup of tea? Where did that come from?

She sits down again. Sips.

Sweet. Am I Alice looking for the Mad Hatter? And that other madman? Maybe it was thanks to a madman that we ended up in Australia.

She shivers at the thought of giving that man any credit. A nerve in her neck twitches. She puts the cup down.

It wasn’t Hitler’s fault that Heinrich broke his neck. Hitler may even have saved my mother’s life.

‘Yes, Katrina. Hitler, you might say, Hitler enabled Bettina to go to Austria and even on to Australia, where she would live happily ever after among the slipstitches of her memories and silences...’

Katrina shivers again and takes a large gulp.

Is this a bloody tea party? Bad was not bad and good was dead.

‘It was a time of mixed messages, Katrina. We have that today, but it is much more subtle now. Then there was only one sort of information. Today there is a flood. The effect, however, is the same. Yes, she was devastated...’

*

Katrina closes her eyes.

There is more?

‘There is more, Katrina. More on Bettina.’

Click.

Snow on the screen.

‘Did you know, that your mother tried to commit suicide?’

That’s a lie. She would never have done that.

‘Why not? She was just eighteen. She was devastated. It is quite normal to have thoughts of ending it all when there is such despair. Did not you yourself want to start a new life at that age?’

I didn’t want to kill myself. ‘This is not about me,’ Katrina says. It is almost a hiss.

‘Not yet,’ I say and let it sink in. ‘But back to our clip.’

Click.

*

I took the savings Heinrich had left me and boarded a train to Garmisch at the foot of the highest mountain in Germany. The Zugspitze. Almost 3,000 metres of unyielding rock at the border between Germany and Austria.

I had wooden skis that I would wear on my few free days in winter to traverse the flat land between Gorenzen and my cousin’s house in Mansfeld, a distance of about ten kilometres. They were old hand-made skis with nail heads clamping on winter boots. My brother, Alvin, had made them for me as a Christmas gift three years earlier.

I rode the rack railway to the Schneefernhaus, the summit hotel, and took a single room for one night. Tears brimming, I carried my skis to the highest spot and pointed them downhill. Just let go. That’s all I had to do.

*

‘She crouched, took a deep breath, and sped in a straight line downhill, the wind and cold making her tears mingle with the snot from her nose.’

You are disgusting.

‘Facts sometimes are.’

*

I tore towards a group of trees, their crowns rising up from the side of a crevice. It would soon be over. Let me fall. Let me not feel it. Knock myself out, fall like Heinrich, die in the snow.

Just before the trees, a young woman turned smartly, spraying snow in my face and breaking my flight. I bounced and rolled, one ski came off, the other came back to hit me on the head. It is over, I thought. The young woman knelt by my side. She wiped the snow from my face. The top of my head was bloodied, she said, from the errant ski. The young woman took off her scarf and wrapped it around my head. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Help is on the way.’ Two skiers braked before us, bundled me into a sling and sped with me between them down to the valley. The young woman skied down after them. Her name was Gertrud Müller. All this I found out when I came to.

*

Click.

Click.

‘Look, Katrina. Bettina in Berlin.’

*

My dark hair plaited over my head in a wreath, a long green apron covering most of my navy-blue shirt and trousers, I stood behind a long wooden bench potting seedlings. Above the bench, a long banner: Gartenbau Müller.

Gertrud Müller had not only saved my life, she had also taken me in, and persuaded her father to give me work in the family nursery. ‘You will now have additional skills,’ Gertrud said. I had no qualifications, and the times were such that papers were required for any movement.

‘They need people like you. It is your chance,’ she said. She was already big with her first child, and suspected twins. ‘You can teach girls to run their households, and to support their husbands and brothers on the farms, just like you used to do yourself in your family. But now you will get a certificate. This is an idea of Hitler’s. And when you are married you can have babies. Babies for Germany.’ She patted the life growing inside her.

‘This is my chance!’ A certificate! A new life. This Hitler had such good ideas. Not just big roads. Hitler’s plans for an autobahn were not realised until 1939, but all his speeches spoke of unifying all Germans, physically and emotionally, and giving us jobs for a better life.

*

What about the Jews?

‘She didn’t know any Jews, Katrina.’

But she must have heard. Kristallnacht.

‘That wasn’t until 9 or 10 November 1938; I am not sure of the exact date. Nobody listens until it is too late. Just look at what is happening today. Did you learn about Kristallnacht at school? It was only much later.’

Katrina shakes her head.

‘See?’

Why should we, in Australia?

‘There were many things not taught at that time; when was it? The Fifties and Sixties? I imagine that other things were more important. .’

Click.

Click.

*

I did well and received my certificate. I also got work. I was in charge of girls from the cities, teaching them how to bake bread, shear and spin the fleeces of sheep and even angora rabbits. I was in charge of eight young women from German cities: Munich, Hannover, Potsdam and Kiel. I wore a uniform with a brooch at my throat. There was a skewed cross on the brooch, but entwining leaves softened the edges. The girls loved me, I felt. I was at last somebody. And then I met Alfred Klain.

*

Click.

‘I can give you a hint of what may come next.’

I don’t want to know.

‘Really? I do not think so.’

Katrina rides her hands through her hair and blows air out in a loud sigh.

‘We must attend to Rule 2, Katrina.’

‘Rule 2?’

‘Do not waste time.’

That’s a stupid thing to have as a rule.

‘There is a use-by date on everything, Katrina. Even on the time to tie up your loose ends.’

She stares at the screen then back at the box, her eyes wide. Tears well in their corners.

‘Under the book there is a tissue,’ I say. I would so hate to see her cry. ‘All this is just background for your own story. You cannot dwell on it. You might reflect on what you know about the Klain boys before we continue.’

‘The Klain boys?’

‘Alfred and Harald.’

Hell! This place is turning me inside out. Bad was not bad and good was a coward. I won’t cry. Not here. Not with this know-it-all voice. What do I bloody well know about the Klains? About anything any more?

‘Perhaps it is time for something a little stronger? A brandy, perhaps? Just a small glass?’

Chapter 5

Let me think. What do I know about my father’s side of the family?

‘Don’t take too long, Katrina.’

She takes a sip of the brandy and shudders. I must admit it is not my best brand. No point in serving the best at this stage.

She cradles the bowl of the cognac glass in her hand. ‘Lousy brand,’ she says. ‘Rough.’

‘I was unaware that you were such a connoisseur,’ I say.

Ha! So he doesn’t know everything.

‘I never said I did know everything. Just the facts, and some more. As we all know, the facts are never the full story.’

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Here’s what I know. Can I click?’

Cheeky of her. Maybe it will work.

Click.

As far as I know or can remember being told, Alfred Klain was the eldest of three sons. Then there was Harald and Fritz, the baby.

Once when I was exploring my mother’s jewellery box I found a brooch, a green insect on a golden leaf.

It’s a beetle,’ I said, running my fingers over the raised shell and feeling the tiny ridges.

‘A scarab,’ Mum said. ‘From Egypt. Very old.’

‘How did it get here?’

Mum took it and turned it over. ‘This belonged to your grandmother. She gave it to me when I arrived in Vienna after the war.’

‘She liked you?’

‘I do not think so,’ Mum said.

‘But she gave you the beetle.’

‘The scarab,’ she said and tickled me, pretending to be a beetle, fingers crawling up my arm.

I squirmed and giggled. ‘From Egypt.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and tickled some more.

‘How did she get it?’ Now it was my turn. I tickled her back.

‘From your grandfather,’ she said, laughing.

‘He went to Egypt?’ Tears of laughter welled in my eyes. ‘Did he meet Cleopatra?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, pulling a straight face.

I copied her. ‘He went to Egypt?’ I said in a serious voice.

‘Yes.’

The giggling was over as suddenly as it had started, but I kept pestering her until she told me that my grandfather had worked for the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. I thought he had taxis, but that was his name. I giggled again. And he lived in Cairo, she said. They had to leave Egypt and went to Trieste. She stayed serious now.

‘That was where he met your grandmother,’ she said. ‘She worked as a chambermaid in the prince’s hotel. Your grandfather was his major-domo.’

‘Major-domo?’

‘The person in charge of everything.’

*

Click.

‘May I continue,’ I say, and she nods. I try and keep the sarcasm from my voice. This is, after all, my show.

Click.

Even a prince had to let go of things and so he let go of your grandfather. But as a gift he put him in contact with a brewery, and soon Otto Klain was selling beer in Austria, with three restaurants in Vienna.

Years later one still has his name painted on a list at the entrance. He had not owned it, but had been the manager from 1926 to 1939.

The Klains were well-off between the wars, and when Alfred was born it had already been decided that he would take over the running of the businesses. The second-born, Harald, would become a lawyer, and Fritz would be given to the Church. That way, business, body and soul would be adequately looked after. The boys went to the Theresianum, the boys’ school par excellence attended by sons of leaders who themselves would become leaders, the Viennese old boys’ club for young ones.

Only a year separated Alfred and Harald. Alfred preferred sports to study and wanted to build bridges. Harald was good at languages and literature, but weak in maths and science. The brothers would share homework and tests, and both graduated, passing in all subjects with the help of a certain sleight of hand.

But Alfred’s dream of building bridges came to naught. He had to learn the hotel trade, for he was to be able to run the three restaurants, the brewery, the small hotel, and whatever other properties his father had procured through the good connections he had established as a security for the future of the family.

As was the custom, Alfred was sent to London on an exchange, to work in the renowned Hotel Rembrandt. The young Kenneth Browning from the Rembrandt Hotel would come to the Gösserhof in Vienna.

Click.