Page 43 of Hell to Pay
“Is this safe for you, Oma?” Alix asked doubtfully.
“If all is as it was,” I said, “I only have to go down. I don’t have to climb back up. That, I fear, would be beyond me.”
“Then you shouldn’t go down,” Alix said instantly. “You can tell us how to find our way.”
“No.” I knew I sounded stubborn. Also irrational. But this was what I’d come for, and I was going to do it. “If the way out is blocked, I’ll … I’ll …”
“I’ll carry you up on my back,” Sebastian said.
“Dude,” Ben said, “I can’t even see the bottom. It must go down, like, forever.”
“And Marguerite weighs about ninety-eight pounds,” Sebastian said. “Excuse me. I believe I’m a football player.”
“You’re a kicker,” Ben said.
“Do you want to fly home in coach?” Sebastian asked. “No? Then stop dissing me.”
I laughed, and it helped. “Let’s go down, then,” I said. “Into the darkness.”
It was like arriving at the train station, but in reverse. Seeing buildings that had been smoking hulks and were now miraculously restored had made me feel as if I’d entered a time machine, like that night had never happened. Going down those stairs and reaching for the handle of the heavy oak-and-iron door, though, it was the fourteenth of February, 1945. My mind knew it wasn’t true, but my body didn’t.
“The door isn’t locked,” I said in some wonder. “I forgot to lock it after me when I came back through it, half-choked by the smoke. My father had just told me hours before to be sure to keep it locked, to keep Dr. Becker and his children safe from discovery, and I didn’t do it. I don’t even remember what I did with the key.”
Alix said, “Well, to be fair, if the palace was burning, I don’t imagine a whole lot of people would have been rushing in to find the secret entrance.”
I wasn’t listening. I still had hold of Sebastian’s arm and was feeling my way along the stone wall with my right hand, just as I’d done on that night. Turning at the corner, then walking so far that part of me wondered if I’d lost my way. Except that it was, of course, a rectangular room, however large.
Sure enough, there was the next corner, and I turned to my left. Five steps, six, and I stumbled.
I would have fallen without Sebastian, but he grabbed my arm hard and held me up. “All right?” he asked. “If you bruise as easily as Alix, probably not. Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. My voice was shaky, because what I’d stumbled over, I saw in the light from all those phones, was a pallet. One of two on that wall, the muslin falling to bits and the straw within nearly dust. “This is where they were sleeping that night,” I said. “Andrea and Gerhardt, the children.Hasnobody found this place, then? Here, Sebastian—around these pallets and across to the far wall.”
“Was there no electricity down here, then?” Dr. Eltschig asked.
“There was,” I said, “though not when I was here. It had gone out during the first raid, and it hadn’t come on again by the time we left. I know that, because the switches will have been left on as one does in a power failure, and whatever bulbs were in the fixtures will have long since burned out. You can come down again later with better lights and find the switches, change out the bulbs, and have a better look.” I stopped again, because Sebastian’s light had picked up something else. Another pallet, the one I’d slept on during those last hours, before I’d known I was an orphan. And beside it, two suitcases, one made of yellow tweed and one of leather.
I said, “We left these. The leather is mine and the tweed Dr. Becker’s. We had to be ruthless, you see, in what we carried. Who knew how far we’d have to go on foot? Will you open them, Sebastian?”
He crouched down and did it, and nine phone lights shone on the contents.
“The pajamas,” I said, “belonged to the Beckers. Funny how one leaves home, even for the most uncertain of fates, and packs as if for a hotel. Some of the children’s extra clothes, and a hairbrush and comb that belonged to Andrea and Dr. Becker. We took only my brush and comb and shared them amongst us. The textbooks and exercise books were the children’s. It was a wrench for Dr. Becker to leave them, I think.They were his … his wish, his pledge for his children’s future. That they wouldhavea future.”
“Was this a teddy bear?” Alix asked, picking up a grubby, droopy thing that looked as if it had been chewed by mice. It probably had been. I only hoped it hadn’t been rats. “The little boy’s?”
“No,” I said. “Mine. I’d packed it in my air-raid rucksack for comfort, because I went down to the cellars during each of those air-raid warnings as a child still. When I left the palace that night, though, I left childhood behind. There was no choice. And look! There’s the key.”
Sebastian picked it up. It was as large as I remembered, the size of his palm. I handed it to Dr. Bauer, and it felt like more than a key I was handing over. She said, “Thank you,” but quietly. Perhaps she understood.
“And these.” Dr. Eltschig pulled out a little pile of fabric scraps and held them in his palm.
“The star,” Sebastian said. His voice was blank. It’s one thing to know a thing has happened. It’s another to be confronted with the proof of it. Yellow six-pointed stars, the ragged threads still clinging where they’d been sewn onto clothing. On each one, the one word printed in faded ink.
Jude.
“Yes,” I said. “I picked them off their clothing with Fräulein Lippert’s sewing kit. My mother’s maid. What do people take to the cellars when everything may be destroyed? The things they use and value most, even if those things seem silly to others. Was Fräulein Lippert going to mend my mother’s wardrobe down there? No, but she took her sewing kit as I took the teddy bear. And when she didn’t need it anymore …” I let out a breath. “I took it.”
“Tell us,” Dr. Eltschig said, “what you did when you woke up. Tell us what happened next.”
