A House on the Rhine Read online

  “But it’s Krista’s birthday too!”

  “I wouldn’t want to miss being at home for Pa’s,” said Krista quickly.

  “And don’t tell him you are going out with Paul on Saturday,” advised Anna.

  “Oh, I must.” There was positiveness in Krista’s voice.

  “No—if you tell him you won’t get there.” Anna was firm. “Tell him you’re working overtime, or that you’re coming out with me to some friends.”

  “Yes . . .” Krista was doubtful. “But Anna, I can’t. I’ve never lied to Pa. Somehow I just couldn’t.”

  “Silly,” teased Anna. “Life’s so complicated that small fibs are a part of it.”

  “I can’t,” said Krista. “If he asks I’ll tell him.”

  “Don’t be a little fool.” Anna was rough but affectionate. “If he asks I’ll tell the lie myself. You keep quiet. He’s not really interested in anything lately—haven’t you noticed it?”

  “Yes.” Krista’s voice was troubled.

  “Well, that’s O.K. then,” said Paul. “I’ll fetch you at one o’clock. We’ll go and eat some place and I’ll bring Bob’s car to pick you up.”

  Krista still looked doubtful. Anna laughed. “Come on”, she said, taking Krista’s arm, “you’d better get home. You’re doing the boys tonight, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you coming too?”

  “Only as far as the next halt—I’m meeting Eric there.”

  They wandered up the steps again and reached the halt on the main road. Here the two girls said good-bye.

  Paul stood looking after the tram as it rumbled and creaked away from him. What was it about this girl? He just didn’t know, couldn’t put his finger on it. She wasn’t really beautiful in the accepted way. When his friend Bob had asked him what she was like he had said slowly, “She’s not so much to look at—I mean she’s no Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell. She’s small and soft, and there aren’t all those curves, but I like the way she looks. I guess it’s just that. The way she looks at me—that’s it.”

  Bob had been intrigued and had wanted to see for himself. When he waited for Krista one evening with Paul he saw what his friend meant. When Krista had come hurrying out in her jersey and skirt and bare legs, looking shy and startled at this friend of Paul’s, he understood. She had something, as they said. Something indefinable but terribly attractive. In her loose jersey her slim childish figure had more charm than the flaunted curves of the average young woman. Bob had been very attracted himself.

  “I’ll tell you what it is about her,” he said shrewdly, “she’s still got the threshold look, and that’s something we don’t meet so often. Most of them have crossed it. That’s her pull on you, Paul.”

  And yet she lived with that terrible foster-family who were said to be completely going to pieces because of the mother. He thought of his meeting with her. He had seen the mother at the Carnival. Dressed in a cowboy’s dress with a wide-brimmed hat and riding breeches which set off her fine hips, she had looked incredibly young with her brilliant colouring and laughing eyes. She had been hanging on the arm of a sleek, dark young man she called Rudi. This was the young man who was said to be causing all the trouble. He had seen the sister Katie. Now there was a bad one, thought Paul. That flaming hair, that white, white skin, the wide mouth—like her mother’s—and the bold black eyes. But she could be a beauty. If she knew how to dress and slim down a little. But she wasn’t like Krista. There was something hard, cold and calculating in her smile of invitation. He remembered vividly that scene on the Rosenmontag in the decorated streets of Cologne. Krista had been standing there with the woman they called Moe. She had looked like some small wild field flower blown there accidentally. She had looked terrified when the wine-filled revellers had snatched at her in passing.

  He had met the father—the man she called Pa. He had liked him. But he hadn’t liked Paul. That had been obvious. He resented him. Whether because of the girl or because of the Occupation Paul didn’t know. Both perhaps. It was all damned difficult; but the fact remained that just to spend twenty minutes with this girl he would, and did, wangle himself leave whenever he could. Bob was good about that. He was always willing to change duty times, lend his car, so that Paul could drive the twenty kilometres or so to the factory.

  “You’ve certainly got it bad this time,” he had said; “and for keeps if I know anything.”

  Paul went now and sat moodily in a café and thought what was the best plan to get around Joseph. His time in Germany was getting short. He wanted something settled about Krista before he left. Something about Joseph attracted him. He was a quiet thoughtful-looking man with a puzzled unhappy face. He seemed to Paul to have known better days, and to be well informed on things about which one would expect him to know nothing. After all, in a country recovering from the upheaval and devastation of war one could never tell. The man could have been anything.

  Paul had taken Krista home after the Carnival. It was late and she was dead tired. But although Joseph had thanked him for looking after her and bringing her home, he had seemed annoyed that she had not stayed with Moe. Krista had said nothing about the young man who consorted with her foster-mother. Paul had been received politely but coldly by Joseph, and he had neither been asked to stay then, nor to come again.

  When, almost a month later, he had been driving near the factory, he had gone in and inquired for her. He knew only her Christian name—that was the rule of the Carnival. She had introduced Joseph simply as “father,” so that Paul did not even know her foster-parents’ surname. He did not know then that they were foster-parents. He had been astonished at the size of the great house in which the family lived. Krista had quickly explained that it was not theirs, but one which had been requisitioned for homeless people who had lost their own homes in the bombing of the town.

  He knew that she worked in the great perfume factory, and he had found it without difficulty. The old doorkeeper had laughed when he had asked if there was a girl working there called Krista. He said that there were over a thousand girls employed in the perfume and cosmetics halls, and how should he know all their names? But when Paul described her, he had smiled and said it must be their “mystery girl”; and he had told him the story of Krista’s being found unconscious by Joseph on the night of a terrible air raid on Cologne. He felt sure that Paul meant that one, he said. When the girls came hurrying out after the six o’clock hooters sounded Paul had scanned each face anxiously; but when she did come, he knew long before she reached him, recognized her immediately by her quick light step and the poise of her head on her slim neck. She was not like anyone else. She was quite different. That was it. At the carnival she had been wearing some kind of fancy flower-girl costume. It had suited her admirably and he had been agreeably surprised when she had told him that the woman called Moe had chosen it for her. Now she wore a grey jersey and skirt, and she seemed to him infinitely more attractive in these simple clothes as she came running out. When she saw him her grey eyes lit up immediately in unmistakable pleasure. She was exactly as he had remembered her.

  “She’s got something—she’s not like the others,” the old doorkeeper had said. He reckoned it was the result of her terrible experiences in the war. In his opinion she was a girl probably brought to Germany with her parents who were doing forced labour for the Nazis. She did not look German, he said—every-one was agreed on that.

  Paul reflected on this now as he sat in the café. If she had no memory whatsoever of any life before that night of the air raid, then whatever she had suffered before that could not have affected her. He realized now that part of her attraction for him could be this mystery about her, but he had known nothing of it when he first met her. It had been a month before he had been able to look for her again because he had been sent away unexpectedly on Frontier duty. Since then all he had seen of her were these stolen minutes by the river. She was always terrified of being late home. The others—Anna, for instance—did not seem to care whe
ther their father was angry or not. Nor did the one they called Katie. No, it was only Krista, and she was frightened of her foster-father. That first evening when he had waited for her outside the factory she had gone with him to a cafe. She had been late home then, and Joseph had been upset. Since then every time he saw her it was the same story. She must get home—she could not stay—Pa would be worried. There was this one thought in her mind—not to be late home.

  Paul was an orphan himself, and the story of Krista’s being found by Joseph and never identified moved him very strongly. He had been brought up in a large State orphanage in the Middle West. He had worked from the time he left there until the recent death of an uncle had left him with money for the first time in his life.

  As he left the café and walked back to the town to meet Bob, he thought of the night when Joseph had found and carried the child Krista through the blazing square to the shelter under the cathedral. His first impression of Joseph had been correct. He was all right. He must be to have taken this unknown child into his already overcrowded family. No one had offered the boy Paul a home, although his parentage was known, and his father and mother a respectable young couple who had been killed in a car accident. He had grown up in the loneliness of a large orphanage, and yet there were relatives who could have taken him in. That uncle, for instance, who had died leaving Paul his money. Why hadn’t he given his sister’s child a home? That would surely have been better than saving the money and perhaps salving an uneasy conscience by leaving it to the boy at his death? That Krista was unusually devoted to her foster-father Paul realized. What he did not yet appreciate was Joseph’s almost unnatural love for Krista.

  IV

  As he trudged, hot and tired, up the road from the station to the village, Joseph saw its ugliness. The hideous little station itself, with its heaps of slag and brickets wept over by three smutty willows. The tiresome barrier across the level-crossing, the silly face of the grinning clock, then the stark grey slate houses each side of the grey cobbled street, the post office, the miserable little grocer’s and baker’s and the tobacconist’s. He noticed them all. Surely this was the ugliest village on the banks of a river famed for its beauty. Everything was smutty and dirty from the fine layer of coal from the great bricket factories. Even in winter the snow was grey a few minutes after it had fallen.

  The fields were rapidly being lost as more and more commercial enterprise sprang up in the great post-war drive for prosperity. As he walked he could hear the eternal clang, clang, clang, of the workmen repairing the war-shattered suspension bridge, and hear their whistles and shouts from the floating raft on which they worked. There had not been a bridge left in the country at the end of the war. Those which the retreating armies had not blown up the advancing ones had shattered. Build, build, build; there was no getting away from it, it was everywhere one went, and yet a man could not get a home for his family. They were not building homes but factories, shops, cinemas, bridges and banks. If a man wanted accommodation for more than two he must provide it himself. The refugees were crowding in from the East, and living-space was strictly rationed to so many square metres per person. Just as in the prison camps each man had been supposed to have a bare minimum of space.

  There came to him suddenly as he trudged, a vision of the Bavarian village where he had been born. The little church perched on the summit with its onion dome, the cool placid mountains behind, and the sweet smelling pines and the tender green of the grass. Strange that he should think of this now. In the thick of the war he had thought of the cathedral with its spires as if it were his home. And now as he passed the narrow eyeless houses he thought of the friendly whitewashed cottages in one of which his childhood had been spent. He saw his father, a strict man who ruled them with the stick, sitting toiling away playing the church organ, saw again the skis and skates he mended for the visitors in winter.

  He hated the dirt of this river village. As he turned into the one and only pleasant lane, lined with weeping willows, he could see the large house which the local housing authorities had requisitioned from the absent owner. Here he had lived with Moe and the children ever since they had been forced to leave the bunker under the cathedral. There had been nowhere large enough to accommodate his family in the town. Eleven children, and Krista whom he had adopted made twelve, and now Katie’s brat Peppi. Fifteen people to house!

  The owner of the property was in prison for war crimes; but his wife came frequently and made terrible scenes about the condition of her property. Moe would shout at her and she would shout back, and finally someone from the housing office would have to be fetched to ask the woman to go away. Moe did not care in the least—she rather enjoyed a battle. She had not asked to be put in this great house, she said; she had just been sent here; but Joseph felt a deep shame whenever the woman came and wept because her husband was being kept in prison by the Occupation and her home had been taken away from her.

  He knew that the property was deteriorating under the abuse of his unruly brood of boys, and at times he would insist that it be tidied up and cleared and swept, but, as Moe pointed out to the owner’s wife, there were other tenants upstairs. Why should their family be blamed for everything? She knew that her family were hated and distrusted by the village, that they were called the “bunker” family in derision of their having lived for so long in one. Their neighbours looked upon them with the same contempt as they did upon the miserable refugees flooding the place now, and regarded them as foreigners just because they came from the town. Moe did not care in the least, but Joseph had always minded this hostile feeling. He was a friendly man at heart, and liked to be on good terms with his mates, although he was clumsy at showing his good will.

  Everything his family did was criticized and commented on by the families upstairs. The house had two bathrooms, and running water in the bedrooms: but even so things had been so unpleasant with the families from the East on the two upper floors that another kitchen had been installed upstairs. Since then there had been peace. Peace at least as far as the cooking was concerned.

  As Joseph approached the house it looked peaceful enough, if untidy, in the late afternoon sun. He knew that he was envied by many for the spaciousness of his temporary quarters but after all, the house built by the owner for his own family now housed thirty-seven people! Whereas the house next door, almost as large, was occupied by a British family who had only one child. What could they want with all those rooms? And, what was worse, the child was away in England at school, so there were really only two people for the whole house.

  He noticed the acacia tree with the same start of surprise as he had the chestnut tree. It was as if a skin had been peeled from his eyes, giving him the clear vision of a child. The dog whimpering on its short chain barked a greeting to him, and thinking of the lion still, he went over and set him free. He ran round in circles with joy, and Joseph noticed with anger several weals on his back as if he had been recently beaten. In one of the front flower-beds his son Franz Joseph and Katie’s son Peppi were making mud pies in the place in which he had recently planted young wallflowers. He raised his hand to smack the boy, then let it fall again to his side. What did it matter about the wallflowers? The whole place was in a mess. The child knew he was doing wrong, and hastily began trying to smooth back the tumbled earth round the uprooted plants. His impish face was dabbed with mud.

  Joseph went into the house. It was deadly quiet. No sign of Katie or of Moe. He looked into the sitting-room, then into the horribly littered kitchen, then into the bedroom he shared with Moe. Outside the small slip room which she had given the lodger he heard a sound . . . then Moe’s giggle . . . and then the deep chuckle of the lodger himself. He rattled the door loudly. It was locked. Heaving his weight against it he forced the loose latch and burst into the room.

  They had thought it was one of the boys trying to tease them by rattling the door. Moe had called out telling whoever it was to go away. As he burst open the door they lay there in the tum
bled bed, Moe, his wife, and Rudi, the lodger, looking astonished at the sight of him. Astounded, not embarrassed—that was what infuriated Joseph. For a split second he stood staring at them.

  “Why, Joseph! What’s brought you home so early? Is anything wrong?” faltered Moe.

  “Get out!” he said quietly; then, as she did not move but just stared open-mouthed, he shouted, “Get out of that bed!” and as she stumblingly obeyed at the violence in his voice he saw that she was naked.

  She fell on her knees before him, terrified at the fury in his face. “Joseph, Joseph!” she cried.

  For answer he spat full at her white body, beautiful still, in spite of so much child-bearing.

  “Slut! Slut! Filthy slut!” he spat at her, and went out of the room, slamming the broken door behind him without a glance or word for the man cowering in the bed.

  He shook so much that he could scarcely control the movements of his body. He had suspected this for some time, imagined somehow that she lay with the lodger, a man almost young enough to be her son. That was why she had brought him back from the Carnival last February. Why then did the actual proof of his fears move him to such violent emotion? Was it anger, disgust, or sheer contempt which shook him so? He didn’t know. His stomach heaved, and with difficulty he kept himself from retching. He went outside to the yard and put his dry mouth under the tap there, and as he did so he trod on the heaps of potato peelings.

  “Pigs! Pigs!” he muttered, leaning against the fence; then, as he heard movements in the passage inside the house, he went blindly out of the gate, ignoring the cries of Franz Joseph to come and see how he’d tidied the flower-bed. He turned back towards the hideous station at which he had so recently arrived, passed over the level-crossing, and went down the ugly street to the beer garden by the river.