Page 25 of The Girl with a Secret
“Yes…” she began, only to ask in English, in her careful, stilted way, “do you know… can you help me… do they… employ… here?”
The nippy’s forehead creased in confusion. “Sorry…?”
Rosa gazed at her helplessly, wishing she had more words. “Work,” she said bluntly. “I need work.”
“Oh, I see.” The woman’s face cleared, to be replaced by a look of dubiousness. “Well, I dunno, miss, you could ask my manager, I suppose…”
Rosa knew the nippy sounded so uncertain because of her accent, her lack of English. Still, she was determined to try.She might not be able to get the kind of clerical job she’d first dreamed of, but she could still work here, perhaps.
“Danke,” she told the woman, and then corrected herself hurriedly, “thank you.”
The manager, a stout, hassled-looking woman in her forties, hands planted on her ample hips and with a plain, no-nonsense expression, listened to Rosa’s fumbling attempt to explain herself tolerantly enough, although with a busy café to see to, she was also clearly impatient.
“If you’re asking if you can work as a nippy, then the answer is certainly not,” she replied with brisk asperity, after Rosa had trailed off, the extent of her English having reached its regrettable conclusion. “Not with that thick accent! You’re Jewish, I suppose?”
There had been no censure in the woman’s voice, but Rosa tensed anyway, before nodding. “Yes,” she said simply. “I will work hard,” she added. “At anything.”
“Well, I’d like to help you,” the woman told her, “because heaven knows it can’t have been easy, to get this far.” She blew out a breath as she tucked a strand of hair back into her graying bun. “Lorna’s left the kitchen,” she mused out loud. “I suppose I could find you a place there, doing the dishes.” She glanced at Rosa skeptically. “It’s hard work, though, and those nice, soft hands of yours will get red and rough. I don’t appreciate quitters, either—if you’re not up for it, it would be better for you not to start at all.”
Rosa didn’t understand everything the woman had said, but she thought she caught the no-nonsense gist. “Yes,” she told her. “That is, I will not quit.”
“It isn’t paid particularly well,” the woman continued, a warning. “Twenty-eight shillings a week, for sixty hours.” Sheeyed Rosa appraisingly. “You look a strong girl, never mind those soft, lily-white hands! Do you want to do it?”
Rosa hesitated for no more than a split second; she had no idea how much twenty-eight shillings was, but the woman had as good as said it wasn’t very much. And sixty hours! There wouldn’t be much time to do anything else—learn English, or explore this city, or properly live. She hadn’t come all the way to England to work as a skivvy day and night, and yet… what choice did she really have, if her parents wouldn’t find work? The rent would be due at the end of the month, and what savings they’d brought with them on theSt Louiswere already nearly gone. She didn’t have the time to search for a job she most likely wouldn’t get hired for. She turned back to the woman.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I will do it. Thank you.”
CHAPTER 11
JULY 1939—LONDON
Rosa stood at the deep sink, elbow-deep in soapy, greasy water, as she tackled what felt like the twentieth cooking pot of the day. She’d been working in the kitchen at the Lyons teashop in Belsize Park for coming on three weeks, and they’d felt like the longest weeks of her life—up early every day to make breakfast and study English, and then a ten-hour shift before she tottered home for a quick meal and bed. It didn’t feel like much of a life, but the twenty-eight shillings in her pocket at the end of each week made it all worth it.
She had one day off out of every seven, and she used it to do her laundry in the old mangle in their building’s scrubby courtyard, or shop for food, or simply catch up on sleep. Once, she’d managed to make it to the British Museum, wandering its great rooms with a sense of wonder and awe, watching couples stroll by arm in arm, smartly dressed and smiling, and she’d felt, for a fleeting moment, as if there was a life for the taking, a happy, busy, and exciting one, only just out of her reach.
In the three weeks since she’d been working at Lyons, her parents, as far as Rosa could see, had not bestirred themselves to do very much at all. Her mother stayed in the flat, and her father had started holding court in the Willow Café, a local coffeehousefrequented by Jewish refugees. It was run by an aging Austrian opera singer, Maria, who had first hosted Russian aristocrats after the war, and now welcomed the latest crop of homeless émigrés into her little sanctuary.
When Rosa had ventured into the ornate room, all gilt and polished wood, a samovar in pride of place, it had reminded her one of Berlin’s elegant cafés on the Kurfürstendamm. Gentlemen and a few women had sat at the tables, somehow managing to look both regal and lost, as they sipped coffee or nursed glasses of schnapps and talked about what the world used to be like. Her father viewed himself, she thought, as something of a leader of this motley group of dissidents and ex-professionals; none of the recent raft of refugees had yet been able to find decent jobs, and so they spent their days waiting for something to happen. But what would, if they didn’t take any action?
Rosa was trying to be patient with her parents; she knew this step down in station was difficult for them, but her mother’s sniffy attitude, her father’s imperious disdain, didn’t make it easy for her. Nor did their new housemates, with whom they had to share the kitchen and living room, stepping over the washing hung out on a line from window to door, or enduring the stink of sauerkraut from the cooker in the hall, both of which Rosa’s mother found near unbearable.
A week into their new life, a young couple had shown up at their door, with the same woman from the British Fund for Germany Jewry standing behind them, looking resolute.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rosenbaum will be sharing this flat with you,” the woman had explained stiffly, eyeing Rosa’s father with a certain wary beadiness; she’d clearly remembered his objections from before and had no toleration for them now.
“Welcome,” Rosa had responded quickly, stepping in front of her father, who had just drawn a deep breath and seemed readyto expound on something or other, nothing Rosa had suspected any of them wanted to hear. “My name is Rosa Herzelfeld, and these are my parents, Elsa and Friedrich Herzelfeld.” She’d stuck out a hand for them to shake, which they’d merely looked at; Rosa thought they’d looked dazed, winded, and she’d wondered when they’d arrived. “We’re very pleased to meet you,” she finished, smiling, while her parents stood behind her, silent and a little sullen.
“My name is Moritz Rosenbaum,” the man had replied in careful German. He’d then nodded at her hand, but did not take it, and after a second’s pause, Rosa had awkwardly withdrawn it. Moritz Rosenbaum was dark-haired and bearded, pale and slight, with rounded shoulders underneath a long, shabby frock coat. “And this is my wife, Zlata.” His wife was also pale and dark, small and slender. She’d worn a shapeless black dress with a black knit shawl draped over her shoulders, and a headscarf around her head.
Rosa had realized, far too belatedly perhaps, that they were Orthodox Jews, who followed far stricter laws about dress and behavior than the Herzelfelds, as secular, liberal Jews, did.
While the Rosenbaums had settled into one of the bedrooms, the woman from the Fund having left breathing, no doubt, a sigh of relief, Rosa’s mother had drawn her aside.
“Rosa, they’reOrthodox,” she’d hissed, her fingernails digging into Rosa’s arm. “And I don’t think they’re even German.”
“They’reJews,” Rosa had reminded her, removing her arm from her mother’s claw-like grasp. “And they’rerefugees.” She’d paused before adding pointedly, “Like us.”
Still, even Rosa had been a bit taken aback by their new co-residents; they kept a Kosher kitchen and observed a strict Sabbath, neither of which the Herzelfelds did, or had ever done.Such things were utterly foreign to them, as foreign as their own secular habits were to the Rosenbaums.
