The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

111 Daughter-of-Pearl 1945

Meanwhile I myself was sitting on the banks of the Oder. Children cried in the darkness and mothers were banging pots. The horses were on the ground, and ahead of us the river flowed from the south to the north, left to right. Slightly further down, a bridge was snorkelling in the water. A torch swayed in the air, reflected in the calm waters of the river, between two half-broken pillars and a semi-submerged bulk of steel. Gunfire resounded in the distance. No one seemed bothered by it. Fatigue had brought us tons of tranquillity. Only those who were hit by the bullets briefly paused in their walks to ponder their fortune or misfortune and then died. The others walked on, unperturbed.

A fortnight must have passed since I’d joined up with these people, German landowners and leaseholders who had ploughed Prussian soil over the centuries and were now trying to save themselves before it became Russian. This had prompted a great parade across the bomb-cratered landscape in the beautiful brown mud and occasional snowfall. The worst part was not knowing where my skin ended and the shoe began. But now our destination was finally within reach. If we could get across the Oder we’d be safe. Hitler would never allow Ivan to cross the river.

It was a beautiful and peaceful war night. We had left a lot of misery behind us, but here hope shimmered in the light of torches. Someone said that February was ending and that March awaited us on the other side of the river. The ground was free of snow and reasonably dry. People settled under the carriages and against the trees and scratched their gun bites. A boy had fallen asleep against the groin of a horse, and bone-weary mothers curled up around their newborn sorrows, the children they had lost yesterday or the day before. Our greybeard had fallen asleep under a horse carriage that had then started to roll; the wheel had stopped against the neck of the old man, who carried on sleeping in his beard. I contemplated his head, recalling all the stories it contained, which he had told us in a corner of smouldering ruins or a warm ditch. A female ancestor of his had been given a pearl necklace by her duke on a trip to Venice before the turn of 1800. This was no ordinary necklace, these were no ordinary pearls, but pearls made of mother-of-pearl that had been kissed by Casanova himself, thus increasing their value. Since then the necklace had been passed down in the family, from throat to throat, land to land, one war to the next, although the pearls had, bit by bit, slipped off the necklace.

‘My great-grandmother and -grandfather lost their land in the first Prussian war and bought it back with eighteen of the Italian pearls. Grandma used four of them to survive the Franco-Prussian War. In the First World War my father saved the family by buying a carriage and two horses for twenty pearls from the necklace. In this war we’ve survived with the remaining few. I paid thirteen for the car journey from Lodz to Warsaw, even though those daughters of Casanova were worth considerably more than that. I paid two to have sixteen people sheltered in the basement of an embassy, four to buy a whole pig, one for a warmer coat for my Anna… and so on, see…’

He pulled a frayed necklace out of his pockets, which now held only two weary pearls.

‘I have two left. Two pearls from the Casanova necklace.’

He looked us firmly in the eye, me and a thirteen-year-old freckled girl, and then slipped the pearls off the necklace, rolled them into his palm. Tiny rainbows appeared on the surface of the grey-white spheres that looked like small hard candies, and those rainbows seemed to have been woven into them like magical patterns made by elves. In the distance, bombs fell from the sky.

‘Now I’m giving them to you, one pearl each.’

We protested vigorously, but he was unyielding. Said he’d lost half his family in Russian air raids and didn’t give a damn about the other half, felt the historical jewels were better off placed ‘in the hands of the future.’

And now I sat here on the banks of the Oder River, gazing out at the water with my hands in my pockets. One held a grenade, the other a pearl.