Page 12

‘We’d best not use all the hut’s matches up. There should be some in my pack.’

Pascal sounded as dazed as she felt. Although he woke up with a speed that stunned her when she began to rifle through his bag.

‘Stop! Wait. There’s something in there you’re not meant to see. A surprise I’ve been waiting to give you.’

It was too late. Somewhere inside her, she’d always known it was too late, but that did nothing to staunch the pain.

‘What are these?’

It wasn’t the surprise he’d intended – his groan told her that.

Noemi pulled out the bundles her digging had unearthed and laid them on the floor.

They were leaflets, three kinds, each bearing different pictures.

One showed an eagle with its wings wrapped round a smiling blond family.

Another depicted a giant standing under a broken bridge, fitting the word Anschluss into the gap.

The third was dominated by a smiling soldier and a worker marching arm in arm.

They all had a swastika in the top-right-hand corner.

They all carried the same message, which she read out loud.

‘National Socialism protects the people: Austrians, join your German comrades and let us build our future together.’

She stared up at Pascal. She stared back at the bundles, feeling ancient. Knowing there was nothing he could say to bring back the magic; trying not to break apart with the pain.

‘You’re right, it’s certainly a surprise.

I don’t suppose I was meant to see these, was I?

’ She brushed away his clumsy attempt to explain himself before he was half a dozen words in.

‘This is why you’re going to Innsbruck. It wasn’t a solo challenge.

You’re delivering recruitment messages. You’re spreading the poison.

No wonder you didn’t want me coming along. ’

He flinched on poison , but he didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything, but Noemi couldn’t stop.

‘Given that I did come, what was your plan? What was I meant to do while you were off playing postman? Sip hot chocolate, stare at the Alps and turn a blind eye?’

His flush told her he hadn’t made any plan at all. She pushed the leaflets away. She would have thrown them on the smouldering fire if he hadn’t scooped them up first.

‘You don’t understand. The Tyrol, and the rest of Austria, is German by rights. We speak the same language; we share years of history. We’re supposed to be joined together.’

‘You sound like your father, which isn’t a compliment.’ She couldn’t look at him. ‘Is that the big idea then? Germany’s going to become the great power you’re always going on about by widening its borders and sucking everyone else in?’

She could sense him bristling before he spoke.

‘No one’s being sucked in. Most Austrians want us here. The rest can be persuaded.’

It was persuaded that gave him away. That explained the warmth of the hotel owner’s welcome and how confident Pascal had been about the provisioning of the Karwendelhaus. That was nothing to do with youth leaders.

She got to her feet and moved to the table. She needed a barrier between them.

‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

He couldn’t help himself. There was a pride in his voice as he answered her that spilled like salt over Noemi’s cracked heart.

‘I’ve been acting as a courier for the Gebirgsj?ger for a while now, yes.

They recruited me after the 1935 rally in Nuremberg.

I’ll join them as a soldier when I’m old enough, but for now I deliver leaflets to the hotel in Scharnitz and to here, for National Socialist cells in Austria to collect and distribute.

And they asked me to go on to Innsbruck this time, which was an incredible—’ He stopped as Noemi shook her head, and he finally remembered who he was talking to and that honour was not the right word to win her back.

‘I’m sorry. I should have told you what I was doing from the start. ’

‘Why didn’t you?’

His answer was a schoolboy’s fumbling. ‘Because you would have told me not to do it, and I’m proud I was chosen. So’s my father.’

He was one step away from asking her not to be angry with him. He should have asked her not to despair. Noemi sank into a chair as the fire fell to ashes and her dreams crumbled.

‘I’m a fool, and so are you. You can’t see Hitler for what he really is.

You’re too lost in the badges and the marching and the promises of glory.

’ She looked up at him, willing him to look at the world through her eyes.

‘We’re not children anymore, Pascal – we can’t keep pretending it will all be all right.

Hitler is full of hatred – you have to see that.

He’s selling you a Germany with no place in it for me, never mind for us. ’

He was so eager to make things right between them, he fell back on the last thing Noemi wanted to hear.

‘You’re wrong – I’ve already told you that. He doesn’t hate you, or?—’

‘Stop, Pascal. Please, stop.’

She rubbed her eyes. She was suddenly desperate for sleep. If he couldn’t hear her after the connection which had just formed between them, where was the hope?

‘Don’t tell me about good Jews and bad Jews again.

Tell yourself that nonsense to salve your conscience if you must, but don’t say it to me.

Nobody at school calls me good. They prefer dirty.

They use Jew like a weapon, and your beloved Führer does the same.

’ She waved her hand at him as he started to argue.

‘Fine. If I’m wrong, then tell me what kind of plan is in place to separate the “deserving Jews” from the less valuable ones if such a thing exists. If you can do that, maybe I’ll listen.’

He stared at her with his mouth open and empty. She could see pain dawning in his eyes, but she couldn’t help him with that. Not until he accepted that he was the one in the wrong, not her. Perhaps not even then. She stared away from him into the cold grate and tried again.

‘Do you know why he hates us? Do you think about that? You’ve swallowed the rhetoric, but have you really considered what every last bit of it means?

Because you have to. If you want to be part of Hitler’s glorious new world, you have to accept all the cruelty that goes with it.

You can’t pick and choose. And you have to ask yourself where this ends. ’

‘What do you mean, where this ends ?’

Noemi took a deep breath. She didn’t know if Pascal couldn’t or simply wouldn’t understand, and she didn’t have an answer for him, but he couldn’t be allowed to escape the question. Not when she increasingly lived her days in fear of it.

‘For me and my family, and the rest of Germany’s Jews, Pascal. If we really are vermin, a contagion Germany needs to be rid of, where does all this hatred end?’

‘Don’t say those words. Don’t use them about yourself.’

He’d slumped into the chair opposite her, all the colour drained from his face. For a wonderful moment, she thought she was starting to get through to him.

‘I have to. It’s what the teachers and your Hitler Youth leader, and your friends and your father, would say about me. And if they knew what had happened between us, they’d think I’d infected you with my poison.’

He looked up at her then. She wished that he hadn’t. He couldn’t hide the panic that flashed over his face. Her body turned into a bruise.

‘Thank God then that it didn’t go any further. I wouldn’t want your life to be ruined because you’d broken the law with me.’

Her despair spilled over and shocked him to his feet. He ran to her side, pulled her up and into his arms, swearing that he didn’t regret anything. But Noemi’s body no longer fitted his, and she pushed him hard away.

‘I’m going home. I’m not going one step further with you.’

Now the panic was in his voice as well as his face. ‘You can’t do that – it’s too dangerous on your own.’

She gave him a moment to add, ‘So I’ll not go on either.

I’ll take you back to Unterwald and make this right.

’ He didn’t. Instead, he started to explain how she didn’t understand the importance of what he’d been asked to do and how it was only a job and didn’t have to affect them, and her heart was too heavy to bear it.

She stepped back out of his reach and wrapped her arms round her aching chest.

‘Then you’ve made your choice. You don’t have to worry about me.

There’s a different path marked on the map, a longer way that skirts the ridge and the pass.

I’ll take that one. Go do what you need to do.

But don’t pretend that things can ever come right between us.

And don’t come looking for me when you get back. ’

She walked away from him then and went up the stairs alone.

When morning came, she crossed her fingers as she got up and sent prayers to anyone she thought might listen that he’d changed his mind. They didn’t work. He wasn’t there. But there was an envelope on the table.

She picked it up, presuming it was an apology, not certain she wanted to read it.

She tore it open, expecting a letter, but instead there was a birthday card which someone – she assumed Pascal – had amended to say Happy Late Birthday Wishes on the front, and a locket inside whose beauty took her breath away.

I know you’ve already had your present from us, but this is something special. My mother called it her little piece of the sky, and she wanted you to have it; so do I. I hope you like it and will wear it for me.

Love, your Pascal

She turned the card over. He must have written it before the trip, before the events of last night, but he hadn’t added an apology or anything else to it.

This must be the surprise he intended.

She held the necklace up. It was the locket with the bright blue stone surrounded by a wreath of enamelled white flowers that Carina used to wear to parties, the one everyone envied.

A family heirloom filled with hope that she’s passing through him to me. As if I still have a right to it.

The tears she’d been holding at bay all night splashed onto the card, blurring Pascal’s untidy handwriting.

She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t imagine wearing the locket, not after all his lies.

Part of her wanted to fling it off the balcony down into the valley and never see it again.

The rest of her knew she’d never forgive herself if she did and Carina found out.

So she stuffed it deep into her pocket instead and trudged out alone into the cold.

Noemi walked the long way back to Scharnitz in a daze. She avoided the town, spent a second sleepless night in a cold and tiny hut and set out again for Unterwald as soon as there was enough light for her skis to safely navigate the snow-covered paths.

Where does this end?

She couldn’t silence the question. She had no hope of an answer. Every path from it led into a darkness she couldn’t fathom. And she couldn’t think about Pascal either, or the feel of his lips on hers, or the fact of his leaving, or she would give herself up to the snow and the ice and howl.

‘I’m home.’

She entered the kitchen worn thin from hunger and fatigue and what felt like the loss of a limb, braced for a furious onslaught. Instead, Frieda leapt out of her chair and threw her arms round her daughter.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off like that. I shouldn’t have frightened you.’

Her mother’s face was ravaged. Her clothes were mussed as if she’d spent more than one night in the chair. But she accepted Noemi’s apology so quickly, it was clear her disappearance wasn’t the sole cause of her mother’s distress.

‘What’s happened? What’s the matter?’

She caught her mother as she crumpled, but it took more than one attempt to make sense of Frieda’s words.

‘It’s your father – he’s been arrested. He’s gone.’