The City of Shadows

13. Oliva Cathedral

Danzig, April 1935

Hannah Rosen arrived in Trieste on the train from Milan. After Venice it followed the Adriatic south, running beside the sea all through a long afternoon as it finally approached the port. It was April and it was already hot. She knew people here. In the Via del Monte, where the city started to wind up the hillside overlooking the Gulf of Trieste, was the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. It was there for the thousands of men, women and children who came every year to take the boats to Jaffa and Haifa to start a new life. Less than twenty years ago, Trieste had been the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was still the funnel into the Mediterranean for most of Central Europe. Few of the Jews who travelled to Trieste had much in common with the young socialists and communists who staffed the Jewish Agency office; they were simply people who believed that keeping your head down wasn’t going to be enough. They were running from what was to come, and they were no more than a drop in Europe’s Jewish ocean.

Hannah’s job was over. In Leeds, in London, in Manchester, in Bournemouth, in Lyons, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan — she had done what she had been sent to do. They weren’t large sums of money. No one ever said that now it was for guns, not tractors, but people had stepped back. Not everyone was so sure about guns. Yet the money still had to be moved, in cheques, money orders, bonds; it still had to reach its destination in ways the British government and the Palestine Mandate Police could not trace.

Leaving the Stazione Centrale, she didn’t head for the centre of Trieste and the Via del Monte. She turned left and walked the few hundred yards to the harbour. At the offices of the Adriatica Line she rebooked her next day’s passage to Haifa on the SS Marco Polo for a fortnight’s time. Then she turned her back on the Adriatic Sea and returned to the railway station. Just before seven that evening she was sitting in a compartment on the sleeper to Vienna, heading for the Free City of Danzig, at the other end of Europe, via Vienna, Prague and Warsaw, a route that would avoid her going through Germany. It was the only precaution she felt she needed to take.

From Trieste she shared her sleeper with a woman who spoke a little English. Hannah’s German wasn’t good, and it was coloured in ways she had been unaware of by the Yiddish her grandparents had spoken. She was surprised how easily it identified her. The woman was from Vienna, middle-aged, well-dressed and Jewish, and perceptive enough to know immediately that Hannah was Jewish too, despite the name she was travelling under, Anna Harvey. The conversation slipped from English into German and back again, but once the woman was in full flight she just kept talking; all Hannah had to do was listen to her, or at least pretend to. The woman didn’t make any real distinctions between England and Ireland, and if there were any she wasn’t interested in them. From Vienna it looked like the same place. She did think the English should keep out of European politics though. They had the rest of the world to make trouble in. As for the Nazis, she told Hannah everyone made too much of a commotion about them. The Germans had always beaten up Jews; in Vienna anti-Semitism was a fact of political life. It came and went, loud and soft, and in between people got on with their lives. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, that’s all you needed to know. It was second nature to him to use anti-Semitism to get to power, but now that the reality of government had dawned, things would calm down; people would have to get on with their lives. It would be business as usual. It always was. As for the Jews who made too much fuss about all that, they didn’t help anybody — socialists, communists, liberals, Zionists, they should shut up. Now it was all very loud; soon it would be quieter again. If you shut up it always was.

The next day, on the train from Vienna to Warsaw, she sat in the dining car some of the way with an elderly couple from Czechoslovakia, though as Germans born in the Sudetenland they didn’t consider their country to be a country at all; they belonged in Germany. They didn’t like politics; politics was what was wrong with Europe. They certainly didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did. He was too vulgar by half. He had saved Germany from socialism, that was undeniable, but the old man wasn’t sure he was good for business. They were delighted to discover Hannah was Irish. They had visited Ireland thirty years ago when the man had gone to England on business. As they talked about Dublin before Hannah was born it was like listening to her father and mother. They made her smile, a sweet couple, still very much in love in their seventies. At one point, the old man took his wife’s hand, telling the story of how they’d met, and he held it tenderly for half an hour. They were good company at first, and that part of the journey went quickly. Then in Katowice, in Poland, a Jewish man in the dark clothes of orthodoxy asked if he could borrow the old man’s Austrian newspaper. It was passed across with a polite smile, and the conversation about Ireland continued. The Jew returned the newspaper when he got off at Cze?stochowa. The old man shook his head sadly. The Jews had a lot to answer for. Politics was what was wrong with Europe and the Jews were the ones who controlled politics, the way they controlled everything. Hadn’t they started the war that destroyed Austria and brought Germany to its knees? Hadn’t they turned Russia into an atheistic wasteland? They were everywhere. You couldn’t move for them in Poland. She was lucky to live in Ireland, in a country without Jews. No, they didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did, but he was right about the Jews. As they left the train at Warsaw, the old lady kissed Hannah and told her how much she reminded her of her daughter.

Two days after she had left Trieste, the train from Warsaw crossed the border into the Free City of Danzig. Hannah was almost at the end of her journey. There had been three months of silence from Ireland as far as Susan Field was concerned. She knew from her father that Brian Field had been to Pearse Street to see Inspector Donaldson several times. There were no developments. The police in Germany had been contacted about the whereabouts of Hugo Keller, with no results. As Keller was an Austrian citizen they assumed he must be in Austria. No one knew whether the police in Vienna had been contacted. None of it was surprising, and Hannah didn’t need to be there to hear what went unspoken. The choices Susan Field had made were not the choices any decent woman would even contemplate. She was an unsolved murder, but the Gardai weren’t looking for a solution, any more than they had looked for an explanation when she first disappeared.

At Christmas Hannah did believe Stefan Gillespie really would find out what had happened to her friend. Perhaps he would have done, despite the doors that were slammed in his face. But he had his own problems. She didn’t know everything, but she was aware that he had been close to losing his job. He had written once, early in January. She knew he was sitting on a hillside in West Wicklow, fighting to stop his son being taken away, because of what he thought or what he didn’t think, because of who he was, and who his parents and grandparents were. He was probably very new to that. She wasn’t. It came as easily and familiarly as breathing. Stefan had been in her mind a lot since she’d left Ireland. During those three months in Europe she had come close to contacting him several times. Sometimes she told herself it was only because Susan’s death was still there, still unresolved, but there were other reasons, and they had as much to do with what was unresolved in her own life as with her friend’s murder. However, she had made decisions about her life that she couldn’t change. It was too late now. She would be back in Palestine soon. She didn’t know when she would return to Europe or to Ireland. Perhaps she never would. But there was still the debt of love she owed her friend. It wasn’t enough that Susan’s death was forgotten. She knew where Francis Byrne was; Stefan Gillespie had told her that much. And if no one could find Hugo Keller, she would at least find the priest.

It was late when Hannah arrived in Danzig. The train had few passengers. When she had crossed the border, the flags were the flags of the Free City, a bright, cheerful red with a crown and two white crosses. The policeman who gave her passport a cursory glance wore the same insignia on his uniform. She had travelled on in the darkness, too tired to do anything other than stare at her reflection in the glass of the carriage, yet not tired enough to sleep. She had no expectations of the city. Danzig had its problems, she knew that, but it wasn’t Germany. Yet it was still a journey no one would want her to make. It would irritate Benny; it was all too personal. But in the end he would understand, at least he would do what he did when she annoyed him — say nothing. Sometimes a show of anger from him would have made her feel less patronised. But all that was for another day now.

When she stepped off the train at Danzig Hauptbahn, the flag of the Free City was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t Germany; it was supposed to be another country, but every platform was draped with swastikas. And as she walked out to the station forecourt, the men standing around the Imbiss stall, eating bratwurst and drinking beer, wore the brown uniform of the Nazi SA. They were the first stormtroopers she had seen outside a newsreel.

The dining room of the Hotel Danziger Hof was noisy with breakfast. It had been almost empty when Hannah Rosen entered, but almost immediately it started to fill up. There was a crowd at the door now, waiting for tables. She sat by a window, looking out at the Hohe Tor, the High Gate, a great blockhouse of bricks pierced by an arch, once the main gate through the city’s encircling fortifications. The walls had been demolished to make room for the modern city, though as modern cities went Danzig wore its antiquity with pride. Once it had been an independent city-state, and it had maintained that independent spirit through the centuries of war that sucked it in and out of the kingdoms of Poland and Prussia. A hundred and fifty years ago the city had fought to remain part of a Poland that guaranteed both its autonomy and its Germanness, in the face of a Prussian juggernaut that had no use for any kind of Germanness other than its own. But that was long forgotten. Beyond the window of the Danziger Hof, in front of the Hohe Tor, was the statue of a man on a horse, wearing a spiked helmet; Kaiser Wilhelm, the first emperor of the unified Germany that had incorporated Danzig into its territory for barely fifty years before the First World War, finally sweeping away its cantankerous independence in a great tide of all-embracing Germanness. Now the Free City of Danzig stood on its own again, a tiny statelet, barely the size of Wicklow, locked in by Poland in the west and south and by German East Prussia to the east. The Free City was the creation of a fledgling League of Nations whose high democratic ideals sat uneasily with the city’s new purpose: to punish Germany for a world war and to pacify Poland. At the heart of the Free City, the League’s High Commissioner fought with the only weapons available to him, little more than good-humour and patience, to defend a democracy almost everyone in the city-state seemed to despise. The last thing German Danzig wanted was to be free again. It was typical of the city’s bloody-mindedness that having regained its ancient independence, most of its inhabitants dreamt only of disappearing back into the all-consuming sea of Germany once more.

‘The Free State of Danzig was involuntarily severed from Germany on January 10th, 1920 by the Treaty of Versailles.’ Hannah read from the guide book she had found in her room. She had brought it with her for the map, but she was grateful that it gave her something to do now. ‘In the face of all force the city has defended its German character through the ages; its very architecture speaks of German character, German art and German will.’ A tour of historical Danzig was the last thing on Hannah’s mind, but The Important Sights of Danzig, along with the view of the Kaiser’s statue and the Hohe Tor, at least kept her eyes from the busy dining room she wished she had walked straight past when she came down from her room. She was uneasy. She would drink her coffee as quickly as she could. She would eat whatever came. Or if it took much longer she would just leave anyway.

The tables were almost entirely full of men, businessmen, salesmen, politicians, journalists. In a few days Danzig would vote for a new parliament. The expectation was that the ruling Nazi Party would win, very comfortably, the overall majority it needed to change the constitution, dispose of the opposition, kick out the League’s High Commissioner, and make this the last election the city would ever see. The road to reunification with Germany would follow; Hitler had already set a pattern for the abolition of democracy by democratic means. Danzig would be next.

Dotted everywhere among the dark business suits, contributing loud, excitable, argumentative voices to the buzz of conversation, were the uniforms of Nazism, of the Danzig Party and visiting SA and SS dignitaries from Germany. Hannah hadn’t expected to be thrown so completely into this world. The Nazis had power in Danzig, but there was still a constitution that was meant to stop them abusing it — at least that’s what the English newspapers said. Yet walking the short distance from the station to Dominikswall and the Danziger Hof the night before it didn’t feel like that. The dark streets were lined with the red, white and black of the crooked cross. In Elisabethwall she stopped to ask for directions. When she turned to walk on she saw she was standing in front of a shop selling children’s clothes. The windows were broken. A Star of David was daubed on the door; and the words ‘Die Juden sind unser Ungluck’. The Jews are our misfortune.

She had slept very little that night. She had thought about Stefan. Now she wished he was with her. She told herself it was because he knew what to say, because he would know what was true and what wasn’t, but it was also because she felt he would make her stronger. She hadn’t considered Danzig being another Germany now. She should have done. She read the papers. Sometimes she could be too single-minded to think things through; her mother always said that. But when her mother said it there was usually something to laugh about. Now she was having breakfast in a room full of Nazis. She felt people were looking at her, and they were. There were other women in the dining room, but she was the only one on her own, fair game for businessmen and reps with nothing better to do. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but now she was starting to feel she couldn’t breathe. A tall SS man was trying to catch her eye. He had been looking at her since he came in.

She got up abruptly, just as the waiter arrived with a basket of bread and pastries, beaming his regrets about how busy it was. He fussed over her, full of kind, concerned apologies, telling her the bread was still warm from the oven, but only drawing more attention to her with his paean to the pastries. She smiled awkwardly, mumbling something about being late, and left. As she passed the SS man caught her eye again; this time he winked.

Irritated by the sense of panic that had started to envelop her, she focused firmly on the concierge’s instructions. She walked quickly away from the hotel. Boys from the Hitler Youth were giving out election leaflets on the pavement. In Kohlenmarkt a column of teenage girls in brown dresses, two-by-two, moved across the square, singing a German folk song, so beautiful that she stopped and stared, almost forgetting where she was. The girl at the front carried a swastika pennant. Hannah could see a Number 2 tram, waiting. She ran to catch it. She felt more relaxed now, grateful for the rattling of the tram. Movement had become important to her in the last few months. A train, a boat, even a few moments on a tram. Everything was easier when she was moving. The tram ran along Stadtgraben, past the station. On the left, the green wooded hills of the Hagelsberg rose up above the city. She thought that in a different time she might have liked this place. Her grandfather had come from Lithuania; it wasn’t so far away across the Baltic. She tried to remember the stories he had told her; the journey that brought him out of Russia to Ireland, through Germany and Holland and England. Hadn’t the boat stopped here? She was sure it had. The journey started on a boat, she knew that. She looked down at the map. The tram was moving out of the city, through the Langfuhr suburbs to Oliva and Zoppot. A line of linden trees stretched ahead. She would see the Baltic Sea soon. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that she would see Father Francis Byrne.

All of a sudden the people sitting around her on the tram got up and moved to one side, crowding at the windows and looking out. She didn’t get up, but she looked. She had been too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the groups of people along the road, watching, waiting, holding swastikas. She could see flags waving now. People were cheering. The passengers on the tram started applauding as they gazed out through the windows. She could see a line of black cars coming the other way, heading into the city. There was an open Mercedes-Benz. A big man in an elaborately belted and bemedalled uniform sat in the back, smiling and waving at the crowds. She recognised Herman Goering from newspapers and newsreels, even in the seconds it took the car to pass. The hotel manager had told her as she checked in; he was flying from Berlin to speak at an election rally. The tram passengers were shouting. ‘Germany! Danzig back to Germany!’ In the Danziger Hof she felt panic; what she felt now was the cold sweat of fear.

She left the tram at Oliva and walked through the quiet park that led to the cathedral. Behind her was the Baltic Sea and the resort of Zoppot. Ahead the hills rose up again, thickly forested, dark even in the spring sunlight. The path led her through landscaped gardens and neat groves of trees. It was a place of carefully tended calm. There were no flags, no uniforms. The city seemed a long way away here. Two gardeners greeted her as she passed. Though the greeting was German they spoke in Polish as she walked past.

She asked for Father Byrne at the office opposite the cathedral. The secretary spoke some English and was keen to use it. Father Byrne was doing confessions in English now, but he would be finished any time. When the woman discovered Hannah was from Ireland she struggled to find the English words to tell her how pleased he would be to see her, then gave up and told her in German anyway. Hannah needed all the ignorance of German she could muster to curb the woman’s enthusiasm and persuade her not to come with her across the square to find the priest. She hurried out quickly.

She stood for a moment, looking up at the two red-brick towers, topped with copper spires, blue-green against a sky that was very clear now. The sun was warm in the sheltered square in front of the cathedral. She felt she wanted to stay a little longer in the light of this place she didn’t know, unsure what finally arriving meant. She steeled herself and walked on.

As she entered the cathedral she expected it to be dark. Instead it was full of light. There was colour everywhere. Stretching along either side of the narrow chancel were dozens of carved and painted altars. It was silent and empty and its beauty briefly stilled the noises in her head. There was a deep smell of old wood and centuries of incense. The only great churches she had been into were St Patrick’s in Dublin and Westminster Abbey in London. They were history lessons in stone. This was a softer place. She could feel the faith that made all its ornateness something simple and reassuring. The almost random confusion of colour and light was a perfection no one had ever set out to create, but there it was. It was everything a synagogue wasn’t. Judaism was a faith that rested in words. It had no truck with all this, decoration piled on decoration. Yet it wasn’t so different. She didn’t often think of the psalms she had heard sung every Saturday of her life as a child, but they spoke of the wild places of the spirit, and in that wilderness they imposed order and peace. These were the words, the same words somehow, in brick and stone. There was a calm here that almost seemed to drain away her purpose. But suddenly that intrusive calm was gone. She saw the priest.

He emerged from one of the wooden confessionals and unhooked a small sign from the door. ‘Father Byrne English Confessions.’ He walked through a line of pews and genuflected in front of the high altar, then moved towards the main door where she was standing. He smiled as he approached. ‘Guten morgen.’ ‘Good morning, Father,’ she answered. He caught her accent easily in those few words. And he was pleased to hear it. He wasn’t very tall. His hair was fair, almost blond. Hannah remembered Susan saying it made him look younger than he was, even though it had started to recede. It was a boy’s hair. She’d said his eyes were very bright. They didn’t look so bright to Hannah. Far from looking younger than he was, he looked older.

‘You’re a long way from home.’

‘Are you Father Byrne?’

There was an intensity in the way she was looking at him that made him very uncomfortable almost straight away. But he smiled pleasantly.

‘I am. Is it a holiday then?’

‘I came to see you.’ There was no lightness in her voice. He didn’t know what to make of her. It was as if there was an accusation in her eyes.

‘Well, I’m glad you did. I just wondered why you were in Danzig.’

‘I was a friend of Susan Field’s.’ She spoke the words softly.

He looked at her with an expression of almost pained bewilderment. It was as if he had to think hard to understand what she meant before he could answer. Hannah said nothing. She just waited. The next words had to be his.

‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed even older as he said the words.

It wasn’t much. She could see he knew it wasn’t enough.

‘I heard, of course. It’s a terrible loss.’

Hannah’s presence really was an accusation; she could see that he felt that. Her eyes didn’t move from his. She could see how much he wanted to look away too. They stood there, looking at one another, for only a few seconds, but the priest seemed frozen. Something was happening behind his eyes, something painful was forcing itself into his head, from the dark corner where he had pushed it. But he said nothing.

‘I want to know why she’s dead. You must know something!’ She blurted out the words. ‘I want to know what happened to her.’

‘What happened.’ He repeated her words slowly, not a question, not a statement, but as if they were in a language he didn’t know very well.

‘Nine months ago she went to Merrion Square for an abortion — ’

‘Please, I’m sure you know where you are!’ he whispered, leaning in towards her, his eyes darting nervously now, as if he was being watched.

‘I do, and I know who you are.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I know you were the father of her child and I know you made the arrangements with the doctor, Mr Keller. Susan wrote to me about you.’

He was calmer now. He had never seen her before, but he had realised who she was. He didn’t know her, yet he felt as if he did. He had heard too much about her from Susan not to. There was only one person she could be.

‘You’re Hannah.’

‘Yes.’

‘You could only be Hannah.’ There was a smile on his lips. It surprised her, not because it was a smile, but because it was tender. There was a memory, and somewhere, in a way she didn’t understand, it mattered to him. As they walked out of the cathedral he put the sign he was carrying down on a table by the door. ‘Father Byrne Confessions in English.’

‘I know you’ve lied to the Guards, in your letter. They know that too.’

It wasn’t quite the truth. The only policeman who knew was milking cows in West Wicklow. The priest didn’t reply. His face was expressionless, but in his silence she could still feel his pain, even though she couldn’t get hold of what it was. They were in the gardens now, among the linden trees and the close, neat box hedges in front of the Bishop’s Palace. He had said hardly anything, but already he wasn’t what she had expected. He was quieter. There was nothing about him that felt like the man Susan had described, talking endlessly, passionately, excitedly through a whole night as they walked the streets of Dublin. He finally spoke again, slowly at first.

‘I didn’t know she was dead. It was only when the Gardai contacted me that I found out. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed hard to believe.’

‘But not very hard to lie, to pretend you hardly knew her.’

‘I’m not proud of that. But I couldn’t change anything.’

‘And that makes it all right?’

He shook his head, looking down at the ground.

‘I’d already told lies. I didn’t know how to undo those. There were a lot of things I couldn’t face. I kept lying.’

She almost felt sorry for him as he looked up, but not for long.

‘You know where they found her?’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to think about that; it was in his voice.

‘He’s left Ireland now, the man Keller, the doctor. He’s been gone for months. They don’t know where he is.’ She wasn’t asking questions now, simply stating the bleak, unhelpful facts to herself. ‘So no one can ask him. No one wanted to ask him though. People even helped him leave Ireland.’

As she watched Francis Byrne she could see something else in his face now; it looked like fear. It hadn’t been there before; that was something else, more like self-pity. But suddenly he seemed oddly far away, as if what he was feeling had nothing to do with her or with anything she was saying.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again bleakly.

Hannah persisted, pulling him back to what mattered.

‘What happened the day she went for the abortion?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t with her.’

‘But you knew she was going?’

‘We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a fortnight. I was about to leave Ireland to go to Germany. It’s what we’d agreed. We both needed to start again. Once we knew it was over, Susan was the one who — she was very firm about what we had to do — even about — she said the end was the end.’

Hannah heard Susan’s voice in those last words; that at least was true.

‘Didn’t you try to find out if she was all right?’

‘We’d made our decision. It’s what she wanted.’

‘You could have asked Mr Keller.’

‘Do you think I felt easy about dealing with a man like that?’

‘No, it must have been unpleasant for you, Father.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Not at all.’

The self-pity was back. It was enough of what he meant.

‘I don’t know what happened. I can’t even begin to imagine — obviously something went wrong with the operation. I didn’t have any idea.’

‘You did send her there. You paid for it. She told me.’

‘Yes. It was wrong. All of it.’

‘Perhaps it was God’s judgement on her, is that it?’ she snapped.

‘Do you think I didn’t care about her?’

‘I don’t know. I know she cared a great deal about you once.’

‘Look, Hannah, I don’t know what she said about me.’

‘Why does that matter now?’

He didn’t reply, but it did; it still mattered. She was uncomfortable with him. He felt unexpectedly a part of Susan, in a way that confused her. She didn’t know what was true now. She didn’t know if she believed any of it.

‘There was a time I did try to talk to Susan, about another way, about leaving the priesthood. It wasn’t a long conversation. She said she didn’t want me to do that. I think we weren’t very good for each other really. She felt that more than I did at the end. We’d both made a mistake. Susan said she didn’t want me to destroy my life for that. We went our separate ways.’

‘What about her life?’

‘If I hadn’t cared about her life, do you think I’d have gone through with it? There was a child, a child we — it was what she wanted. I owed her that, even if the price was a sin.’

‘I don’t care about your sins. I only care about my friend!’ There were tears of anger in her eyes.

Her voice was softer suddenly, almost pleading.

‘There must be something else you can tell me!’

‘I did love her. I don’t know what she felt about me. I never did.’ It felt like the truth, but it was his truth, selfish, secret, self-absorbed.

Hannah wanted to turn on him and scream. She couldn’t give a fuck about his feelings, but the words startled her. No, he never did know. She saw something she hadn’t seen before, something she had never caught in Susan’s letters. The words were in her head again and she could hear Susan’s voice saying them; the words tumbling over each other as they did when she spoke. Susan had always used the word love too easily. There was attraction, friendship, fun; there was intellectual fire; there was the joy of a passionate secret; there was sex. She used to laugh at Hannah because she held on to the word love and kept it close, as if it was too precious to use. As Hannah looked at he priest now he seemed weaker, smaller. She wondered if he ever had been quite the man Susan wanted him to be, the man she wrote about when she first met him. Did he really know nothing? After all this time, was it just that he simply didn’t know?

‘I need someone to tell me why my friend is dead,’ Hannah said, her voice more measured again ‘You’re the only person there is. Can’t you understand?’

‘I don’t know. I only know I wish she wasn’t dead. I wish she wasn’t.’ He whispered the words over and over again, like a prayer. ‘I wish she wasn’t.’

As he spoke, the first of the Angelus bells tolled. Father Francis Byrne crossed himself. It was as if he had put on a new face quite suddenly; the vulnerability was gone. He seemed stronger. She knew he would say no more now. He had told her enough of the truth for her to almost lose her way in it. But it still wasn’t the whole truth. She knew that. She shook her head.

‘I won’t let her be forgotten. I won’t stop!’

She spoke quietly, fixing his gaze as she had when she first saw him in the cathedral. Then she turned away, walking faster and faster. The sound of the Angelus bell filled her head. Perhaps it had stopped, but as she hurried out through the park, back towards the road, she could still hear it ringing.

Francis Byrne watched her walk away. He heard the bell too, in his own head. It was a daily sound of reassurance and faith in his life. Now it hurt. The strength Hannah had just seen in his eyes was an illusion. As he whispered the familiar words to himself they seemed less familiar, less comfortable, less reassuring, as if they no longer quite belonged on his lips. ‘Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.’ The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. ‘Et concepit de Spiritu Sanctu.’ And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.

Hannah sat in the restaurant in Frauengasse for a long time that night. She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to go back to her room at the Danziger Hof. She needed to do something. She felt a long way from the people she cared about, the people who cared about her. But she wasn’t sure being with them would help. Her mother and father thought she was in England. That was a simple enough lie. Other lies weren’t so easy. Her mother probably knew some of them, but she would never say anything. Sarah Rosen had always believed that life’s difficulties would go away if only you spent long enough not talking about them. Hannah’s father never spoke when things went wrong for different reasons; he didn’t notice. She loved them; him for his fond blindness, her for her indefatigable hope in a natural law that said things got better if you left them alone and didn’t pick at the bones. As a Jew it was an approach to life that set hope defiantly in the face of experience.

Hannah had always envied Susan’s family its furious passions and even more furious arguments. In the Fields’ house everyone talked about everything; every slight, every mood, every love, every hate. Sometimes it seemed as if the smaller the problem the more noise it generated, as the whole family, mother, father, grandparents, children, dissected and criticised each other’s opinions and moods. They lurched from laughter to tears and back again with chaotic intensity; they were rude, dismissive, sarcastic, intolerant and unforgiving, sometimes for as long as a whole afternoon. They told each other everything and if there were no secrets or conflicts or emotional disasters to be revealed, they’d make some up anyway. Hannah’s house was, by contrast, a place of small gestures of fondness rather than fierce statements of love and despair. They never said exactly what they felt. And yet it had all changed for Susan. Her mother died, her sisters left Ireland, and after a while her father’s voice was only heard in the synagogue. With all the open hearts that had surrounded her as a child, she found no one to talk to in the face of what became the last as well as the first real crisis of her adult life. Perhaps Hannah and Susan weren’t so different. Or perhaps there were times you were alone, simply alone, and that was it. Hannah felt that now.

In Palestine Benny was waiting for her to come back. And it was back, not home. Whatever she sometimes wanted to believe, Ireland was still home. It had seemed like a good idea for her to spend these months in Europe. There was the money to collect and send on its circuitous way through Europe to Palestine, to buy arms for the Haganah. There was a system in place and no shortage of helping hands along the way. It wasn’t dangerous. Hannah was a courier, no more than that. But she knew why Benny had pushed her forward. It gave her the chance to spend some time with her family in Ireland. He knew she needed to try to find out what had happened to Susan Field too. He wanted her to get it out of her system. Not just Susan. Ireland. He understood that she had to come to terms with her friend’s death, but he didn’t understand everything it had stirred up. Finding out about Susan was complicated. It was not only a reason to go home; it was also an excuse.

When she first left Ireland for Palestine, Hannah was determined she wouldn’t live anywhere she was ill-at-ease. She had felt the darkness in Europe drawing in. She wanted Ireland to be immune from that but it wasn’t. Yet Jewish Palestine hadn’t become the place she wanted it to be. She was ill-at-ease there sometimes as well. She had poured her passion into it, and if that flagged she had Benny now; he had enough passion for both of them when it came to Israel. But it wasn’t enough. She had left her home behind, with the full consciousness that she wanted to escape the kind of mild and unemotional ordinariness of her mother and father’s marriage, yet she was going to marry a man she felt friendship and admiration for, rather than love and passion. All around them there were extraordinary things happening. And there was nothing ordinary about Benny Jacobson. Life was too important for ordinariness as far as he was concerned. They were creating a new Israel. But when the door closed on that, and they were alone, she wasn’t sure she knew him. When they stopped talking breathlessly about the future of a nation, she wasn’t sure they had anything else to talk about. Perhaps he had used up all his passion. He never argued with her; he never lost his temper. How could she tell her parents she was afraid of a life that was only distinguished from theirs by the sunshine?

Hannah and Susan had never lied to one another in their letters, but there was a truth that neither of them recognised in the other. Susan read about Hannah’s relationship with Benny, already a second-generation Jewish immigrant in Palestine, with envy. When Hannah first read about Susan’s secret love affair, she was sometimes envious too, simply because it was full of the passion she told herself didn’t matter. That envy faded on Hannah’s part as she became more and more anxious about her friend’s hopeless relationship. But both of them were lost in different ways; perhaps they had both sensed it in each other. If they had, it was too late to say anything now.

The waiter poured her another glass of wine. As she drank it she felt the events of the day blurring with all the other things that were in her head. The person she needed to talk to was Stefan. He would have got more out of Francis Byrne, much more. Her journey was ending and she still hadn’t achieved what she had set out to achieve. There were still no answers. She was angry, with herself as much as with anyone else. As she left the restaurant and walked back to the hotel through the narrow, ancient streets, the swastikas fluttered above her all the way. They seemed to hang at every window, flapping and cracking threateningly in the wind blowing from the Baltic.

In Langgasse an open truck drove past. In the back were young Nazis in uniform, electioneering; making sure that any opposition that dared to appear on the streets was beaten to a pulp. After two months there was no one really left to beat. Shouts and wolf-whistles were flung in her direction from the truck as she turned into Kohlenmarkt. The lights of the Hotel Danziger Hof shone brightly ahead. The square was full of people. Coming towards her was a brass band, flying the obligatory red, white and black and playing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’. The crowds around her were applauding and singing. ‘Zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum deutschen Rhein, wer will des Stromes Huter sein?’ The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine, who will stand watchman on the Rhine? She took no notice of the cars outside the hotel or of the uniformed Danzig policemen at the door. She had no reason to. Even if she had noticed the man in the leather coat talking to them she wouldn’t have known he was a Danzig Gestapo officer. Suddenly a car door opened in front of her. She almost collided with the man who leapt out. ‘Jesus, look where you’re going!’ He was young, twenty-five. He looked at her hard, but there was a smile on his lips. He saw she was a little drunk.

‘Fraulein Rosen?’

‘Yes,’ she said automatically, unthinkingly in English.

He grabbed her wrist. Now she was aware of another man behind her, holding her other arm. She struggled and started to call out. ‘What are you doing? Let go of me!’ The second man put his hand over her mouth and then she was inside the car, the two men on either side of her. She was still being held tightly; her mouth was still covered. There was no room to struggle. The driver put the car into gear and pulled away. It had taken only seconds. No one had heard her over the sound of the brass band. Most of the people in the square hadn’t even noticed. Those who had were too used to seeing people pushed into cars by the Schutzpolizei or the Gestapo, or being thrown off the back of moving trucks by Nazi stormtroopers, to feel there was anything unusual going on. There was, after all, an election to win. It was just the rough and tumble of democracy. Inside the car the grip on Hannah Rosen’s arms was unyielding. The hand over her mouth pushed her head back even more painfully into the seat. There was no point fighting.