Nothing But Fear Read Online Free

seven hours in the cellar when the air-raid sirens sounded, they carried on with their parties afterwards, she said, and didn’t think about the war. It was way off in the distance, something you read about in the papers – and her friend, Inge Wolf, had taken her final exams even as the Russians were entering the city.
    I could picture Mother waltzing through the smoking ruins of Berlin to the sounds of Zarah Leander singing
Davon geht die Welt nicht unter
, while Inge was up in front of the blackboard answering the examiners on that day of judgement, and none of it seemed that dangerous. Mother made light of it, telling me about the work camps where they had to do social service so they could go to university – it was called
Arbeitsdienst
– and where female camp commandants had their hair plaited in coils, wore brown dresses and were out-and-out sadists. At six o’clock there was
Fahnenappel
, the morning roll call, when the flag was raised –
Sieg Heil!
– followed by gymnastics before breakfast. They worked on the farms in blue overalls, hacking beets, emptying latrines and spreading their contents on cabbages as manure, and in the evenings they would be schooled in Nazism. After that, cabbage was served up and then it was bed. Mother played the accordion for community dancing and got up the nose of the camp commandants, who hated her for her beauty, her pride and her wealth. They sent her out to pick the caterpillars off the cabbages in the fields all day long, and at morning roll call it was,
‘Hilde Voll, vortreten!’
And she would step forward and be given a dressing down. She was subversive by nature. She was inflaming the camp.
‘Du hetzt das Lager auf!’
It was the same old story at every camp they were made to set up before the war – and so much the better, for the main thing was at all costs to avoid being sent to a munitions factory.
    Mother put on a fresh record,
Das Fräulein Niemand
, humming along to the words.
    Miss Nobody loves the Prince of Nowhere;
    When he is near, so happy is she
.
    They both of them live in a castle of air
    In the land of dreams by the Golden Sea
.
    Then she talked about her childhood friend, Stichling. His father had been chief of police in Kleinwanzleben, where she grew up, and he had a skeleton key, and they had let themselves in all sorts of places in the town, and Grandmother loved him. He had gone into the cavalry and become a tank commander. Mother fell silent. The record was finished, and that was the last I heard of him.
    My mother was a woman of the world who had become stranded on the edge of the world, and she had lost more in Nykøbing, had let herself go more than I ever realised. After the war she left the remnants of her life behind – her family and her name, her country, her language – and moved to Denmark because she fell in love with Father. She put up with the humiliation, the contempt, allowed the hatred of Germans to fall on her head, and carried on loving Father and calling him her Apollo. He was her be-all and endall, he was all she had – no one else would consort with a German. Mother sighed in that way of hers and said
‘Ach ja’
and then took a puff of her cheroot and emptied her glass before putting on
The Threepenny Opera
, and we sang ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Cannon Song’ and ‘Pirate Jenny’, and when it came to the place where they ask her who is to die, we answered in unison, ‘Everyone!’
    I always hoped that it would be just as it was in thesong, that a ship would come with fifty cannons and bomb Nykøbing to smithereens and rescue us and take us far away. When I was down at the harbour playing, I would stand looking out for the ship, would imagine it sweeping up the sound with all sails set and laying anchor out there. Then the Jolly Roger would be run up the masthead and the bombardment would begin. And before the day was over the town