The Restaurant Read online

  She turns to her companion, the mother of the crèche owner. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, getting up, careful not to look in the man’s direction. Emily is at the far end of the table, refilling bread baskets. ‘I’ll be off,’ Astrid tells her, handing over payment.

  ‘Everything alright, Astrid?’

  Something must be showing in her face. ‘Yes, everything is fine, thank you. See you again soon’ – but when she emerges from the restaurant she hails the first taxi she sees, instead of walking back to the bus stop on the main street as she always does. Straight home she goes, no wandering into a shop or two today while she waits for her bus.

  Outside her house she pays and thanks the driver, and lets herself in. She sits by the open kitchen door, coat still on, gazing out but seeing nothing of her garden with its out-of-control shrubs, its weed-choked flowerbed, its straggling hedge, its lawn patched with moss that normally fills her with frustration. Today her head is too full, after a chance thoughtless remark, of what she hasn’t managed in over eighty years to forget. Today she finds herself pulled back into memories that clamour once more for her attention.

  Instead of the neglected garden she sees her brother Gerhard coming home from school in tears one afternoon, his bare legs streaked red from having been whipped with ropes by a gang of Aryan boys who had lain in wait for him, or for any Jewish boy unlucky enough to fall into their path. It was the spring of 1939, a year almost to the day since German boots had marched onto the streets of Vienna, and Adolf Hitler had declared Austria to be part of the Reich, and life as Astrid knew it had begun to change.

  The arrival of the Germans had been followed by a spate of violent acts in the city, the news of them spreading in frightened whispers. Houses attacked, shops vandalised, sudden angry eruptions on a pavement, often in broad daylight, that could leave a person – man or woman, or even child – bleeding on the ground. An old man pushed from a moving tram one afternoon, a girl set upon by others on her way home from school, her uniform torn, her hair hacked off with a knife.

  Why? Astrid had asked, and her parents had told her that some people just didn’t like Jews. It had bewildered and unsettled her, the idea that a person could be resented simply because of his or her religion. It had caused a quivering inside her. Could people know, she’d wondered, just by looking at her, that she was Jewish? Might her family be targets? Might they too be attacked on the street?

  And then had come the Saturday when her father had announced that they would no longer be visiting the synagogue. From now on, he’d said, we will pray in the homes of our friends, or they will pray in ours. Hearing this new development, Astrid felt a sense of relief – walking into the synagogue each Saturday, clutching Mutti’s hand tightly, she’d felt terribly exposed, knowing the action proclaimed loudly their Jewishness to anyone who might be watching – but she also recognised the new erosion it signalled, the further crumbling of the familiar, another step into the unknown.

  It had added to her paranoia. Each night she would find it harder to fall asleep. Each morning she would walk to school with a sense of foreboding, sensing that she was being watched, sized up, hated. Every day it felt like she was waiting in dread for the next bad thing.

  And the next bad thing never took long to arrive. I’m not allowed to talk to you, Birgit Greiser had told her in the schoolyard. My mother says I can’t hang around with Jews any more. Others had followed suit – Birgit was popular – forcing Astrid and the other Jewish girls to form their own circle. Pushing them out, making them feel as if they’d committed a crime – but they weren’t criminals, they were innocent children.

  The weeks and months had passed. People Astrid knew had begun to disappear. Dr Taubmann, who’d seen her and Gerhard safely through the usual childhood illnesses, had been replaced unexpectedly with another doctor. Her father’s friend Oskar, who was also his lawyer, had closed his business abruptly and moved away with his wife and young child. The local pharmacy had changed hands, and the Neumanns who had owned it were suddenly gone, all seven of them. Jutta Peckel, a classmate and friend of Astrid’s whose father was head librarian in Vienna’s largest library, had also vanished, along with her entire family.

  They moved to America, her father had told Astrid when she’d asked about the Peckels, but Jutta had said nothing at all to her about this. Why would they suddenly go without telling anybody? Why would they leave no forwarding address?

  New notices had kept appearing in public places, forbidding Jews to hold bank accounts, to own businesses, to attend the cinema, to go to university. Every week, it seemed, to be Jewish was to have the world more set against them – and then had come the monstrous, terrifying night in November, the night of breaking glass and shouts and running footsteps and smoke, when Jewish shops and synagogues had been raided and ransacked by angry mobs, when buildings had been set alight and their occupants beaten or chased away, or worse.

  After that, the fear had been everywhere. Astrid had seen it in the eyes of her parents and grandfather, had sensed it in the hurried muttered conversations that would break off as soon as they noticed her nearby. And now it was the spring of 1939, and Astrid was eleven, Gerhard a year younger. Their father Wilhelm worked as a hotel cook; their mother Monika was in demand as a piano teacher in the homes of wealthy Austrian families, Jew and Gentile alike. Opa Josef, Astrid’s maternal grandfather, had moved in with them after Oma Ursula had died, four years earlier.

  A week after Gerhard’s attack, her father was dismissed from his job. I’ll find another, he promised them, cooks are always needed – but Astrid saw his forced smile, saw the defeat in her grandfather’s face, the helpless anger in her mother’s. That evening there was more murmured dialogue. Astrid sat on the stairs in her nightdress, knees drawn up, arms wrapped tightly about her, and strained to hear sounds she couldn’t distinguish, her throat aching from the effort of keeping in the scream that wanted so badly to come bursting out.

  The next morning, over breakfast, their father told them they were to leave Vienna. It’s important, he said, hands cradling his coffee cup, that you say nothing to others, not even your good friends. We must keep it our secret.

  When will we go? Gerhard asked.

  As soon as possible. As soon as we can arrange it. The end of the week, I hope.

  End of the week. Three more days. Where? Astrid asked.

  Her father spread his hands. Wherever we can. Wherever will have us.

  She searched his face, looking for comfort she didn’t find. Couldn’t we go to America, like Jutta and her family?

  A long moment passed, during which her mother rose abruptly to her feet. Maybe, he replied finally, while Mutti gathered plates noisily and didn’t look at him.

  It was Tuesday, the day Astrid went from school to her ballet class. She lived for Tuesdays, for the single hour that she could lose herself in arabesques and pirouettes and pliés with her companions, when her biggest concerns were the positioning of her feet and the placing of her arms. This Tuesday though, the class didn’t work its usual magic. Concentrate, Astrid, her teacher scolded, but concentration was so hard, with her father’s announcement cranking up the fear. She couldn’t think beyond the upheaval that was to come, the new and surely dangerous path they were to embark on in just a few days.

  Come straight home afterwards, her mother had said, and Astrid did. It was past four, the scent of newly bloomed apricot flowers sweet in the air, but as she scurried through the streets she was oblivious to all save the urgent need to get home, to reach a place of safety. She passed a jeweller’s shop whose brickwork had been freshly defaced: red paint dribbled like blood from the uneven letters of Juden raus. In her state of fright, every person she met seemed to glare at her: she expected, any minute, to feel the impact of a clenched fist against the back of her head, the slap of a hard palm on her cheek. What had they done, what had any of them done, to merit such hatred?

  Her destination, her refuge, drew closer. Two minutes and she would be hom
e – but as she approached her street, a large dark green truck emerged from it and turned in the direction of the city centre, away from her. She instinctively ducked into a shop doorway and peered out until it had disappeared, fingers tightening on the handle of her satchel, heart beating so hard it hurt her chest.

  The bell above the shop door pinged behind her: she fled, not turning to see who was coming out. She raced the rest of the way home, scrabbling frantically with her key at the front door of their apartment building, half falling in her headlong rush up the three flights of stairs, her panic increasing with each tumbling step. She reached the third floor and stopped dead, panting heavily as she took in a new and freshly appalling sight.

  Their apartment door was wide open.

  It was never left open. Never.

  For long minutes she remained rooted where she was, too afraid to move for fear of what she might find. She stared into what she could see of her home: a portion of the hall, the sitting room and kitchen doors, also open. She strained to hear anything, any noise that might offer a clue, but no sound issued from within. No sound came either from the other two apartments on their floor, in which the Kerns and Frau Bauer lived.

  Her breathing gradually calmed, but her terror didn’t abate. She could taste it at the back of her mouth; she could smell the cold metallic ooze of it. After what felt like a lifetime she took a slow trembling step towards the doorway, and another, everything standing to attention in her, every muscle poised to run again.

  At the open doorway, she stopped. Should she knock on one of the neighbours’ doors? Should she check with them before going further, see if they had any information, ask one of them to come with her into the apartment?

  No. The paranoia of the last several months kicked in. The Kerns and Frau Bauer weren’t Jewish: she tried to recall recent encounters with them, searching her memory for any slights she might have overlooked, any indications that they had crossed the same invisible line as her classmate Birgit Greiser, and were now her enemies. Had Herr Kern’s greeting of a few days earlier been colder than usual? Had Frau Bauer looked strangely at her the last time Astrid had held the front door open for her?

  She couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t involve them.

  She forced herself to cross the threshold. She lowered her satchel noiselessly to the hall floor, slipped out of her shoes. Mutti? she called – but it wasn’t a call, it was a whisper. Knowing, already knowing, that nobody was there to answer.

  Papa?

  Gerhard?

  Opa?

  She walked through the empty apartment in stockinged feet, every creak of her weight on the floorboards sounding obscenely loud. She saw Gerhard’s school coat thrown across his bed, her mother’s apron hanging from the stove rail, her father’s boots by the fire escape, one standing sentinel, the other tipped onto its side.

  She narrowly avoided stepping on her grandfather’s spectacles, lying just inside his bedroom door, one lens shattered into tiny pieces as if stamped on. She stooped and collected the glass slivers with trembling fingers, and tipped them into his waste bin. How would he see without his spectacles? How would he read his beloved books?

  She returned to the hall, her head spinning. She pressed her face to her father’s coat, pulling the smell of his pipe tobacco into her lungs. She took his hat from its hook and inhaled the citrus tang of his hair oil. Where were they? Where had they gone, without leaving her so much as a note?

  Astrid!

  She started violently at the hissed word. She swung around to find Frau Bauer standing in the doorway, a hand holding her black cardigan closed.

  They were taken, her neighbour said in the same low, urgent tone, not fifteen minutes ago! You must leave, child – you must leave now, immediately!

  Taken? Her heart falling, dropping, stopping. Fright batting like a trapped butterfly against her ribcage. Who took them?

  The Gestapo, the soldiers – quickly, Astrid, you must leave this place! Go!

  Without waiting for a response, Frau Bauer wheeled away and scuttled back into her apartment, shutting the door quickly behind her. Astrid stood stunned, shocked, wanting to cry but unable to. Her family, taken by soldiers – as the Neumanns must have been, she realised suddenly, the knowledge landing with a leaden thump inside her. And her friend Jutta, and all the others who’d disappeared so abruptly. Not gone to America, not moved to begin a new life but snatched away – and now Mutti and Papa and Gerhard and Opa had been taken too.

  The truck: she knew without a doubt that they’d been in the green truck she’d seen. She’d missed it by minutes – but now she was alone, with no clue what to do, and no idea when her family might return. You must leave now, Frau Bauer had said, you must leave this place – but where could she go, with danger suddenly looming monstrously all around her? Her other grandparents, Papa’s parents, had fallen victim in their forties to a deadly flu that had swept across Europe in the wake of the Great War, both of them gone before Papa was a teenager. Her only uncle, Papa’s older brother Stefan, had died in a skiing accident a year after Astrid was born. No aunts, no cousins, no other family that she was aware of.

  She was eleven years old, and more afraid than she could ever remember being. Her mind raced, searching for inspiration, hunting through everyone she could think of to find someone who might help her. Not her classmates, not the Jewish girls she hung around with at school, for they must be in as much danger as she was, or soon would be – and not the others, not the Birgit Greisers who shunned her and her kind, and who couldn’t now, in this new and terrifying world, be trusted not to do worse.

  And then, out of nowhere, she thought of Herr Dasler, one of her mother’s music students, who insisted on driving Mutti home after each lesson. Herr Dasler, who wasn’t a Jew, but who seemed to bear them no ill will when Mutti would invite him in for a cup of coffee. Herr Dasler, who hadn’t abandoned Mutti like some of her other Gentile students over the past weeks – hadn’t she given him a lesson only a few days before?

  That’s where Herr Dasler lives, Mutti had said, some Sunday when they were out on a drive – maybe their last Sunday drive, before Papa had decided to put a stop to it – and Astrid had taken in the big house flanked by trees behind wrought-iron gates. He must have lots of children, she’d said, and Mutti had laughed and told her no children, nobody at all. He lives alone, she’d said, and Papa had made some joke and called him Mutti’s boyfriend, and Mutti had slapped his leg, but not in anger.

  Astrid would go to him. He was her only hope, the only one she could think of. She would wait until darkness and then she would find his house, and beg him to help her. She would offer to work, to clean for him, to scrub his floors in exchange for sanctuary until this horrible time was past, and her family were home again.

  She closed the apartment door quietly and went to Gerhard’s room. She crawled under her brother’s bed and clutched one of his tennis shoes she found there, and lay on the dusty floor in a tight tense ball as the bedroom darkened with unbearable slowness. Every sound, every small movement filled her with fresh terror, convinced her that the soldiers were returning to find her, were about to burst in and drag her from her hiding place.

  She tried not to think about her family, and where they were, and what might be happening to them, but her traitorous mind kept returning to the stories of violence against Jews, kept imagining the worst possible outcomes. Let them be safe, she prayed silently. Let them be safe. Let them come home. I will work harder in school, I will be good if you spare them. I will help Mutti more. I will wash up after every meal without complaining. I won’t fight with Gerhard. I won’t be cross when he takes my pens for his projects and leaves the caps off.

  She grew cold and stiff as the minutes and hours crawled by. She had no idea what time it was: her watch, a tenth-birthday gift from her parents, was in her satchel. She’d removed it for the dance class and stowed in the front pocket as she always did, and left it there afterwards in her haste to get home. She was
hungry, nothing eaten since her lunchtime sandwich. She closed her eyes: it was possible that she slept a little. Maybe, despite the cold and the terror, or maybe because of it, her mind shut down for a short while.

  Later, much later, a lifetime later, she emerged from under the bed and got slowly to her feet, trying to coax movement into her protesting muscles. She felt her way through almost total darkness to the kitchen, listening intently for a sound, any sound, that would send her hastening back. Her searching fingers closed on a loaf of bread: she tore pieces from it and chewed rapidly. On its own it was dry and hard to swallow, but she was too afraid to rummage for anything more, or to turn on the tap for water in case someone heard.

  In the hall she found her coat and put it on, and buttoned it with trembling fingers. In the gloom she made out the pair of pen-and-ink prints of birds on the wall, reduced now to muddied grey squares; the long slender cylinder of her father’s umbrella, still propped where he always left it in the corner behind the door. She found the dark bowl of her mother’s good hat on the hallstand: the curved, barely visible wisp of its feather, the jauntiness of it, seemed obscene in this horrifying new order.

  She could smell the mix of shoe polish and wood that she knew so well. The bread she had eaten too quickly lodged like wet sand in her stomach. Leaving the only home she had ever known, leaving on her own like this in the darkness was so dreadful a prospect she could hardly bear it. When would she return? When would they all be together again under this roof?

  As well, perhaps, that she didn’t know the answer.

  On the point of opening the door, a new thought struck her. She tiptoed back to her parents’ room. Gently, gently, she coaxed out the bottom drawer of the big mahogany chest and lifted away the folded sweaters until she found the jewellery box. Not a very good hiding place, Papa had said, but Mutti had kept it there anyway. Astrid fumbled it open and rummaged silently through the necklaces and rings until her fingers touched the smooth round coldness of the pearls.