‘Are you ready?’
Paul was staring at her, frowning; Liese pulled herself back to the present.
‘Close your eyes. Remember what we’ve practised. Take a deeper breath. Tell me the notes you can sense. Then, put them together and tell me their story.’
She did as she was told. She let the chair’s padded back, the carpet’s plush, the tip-tap of footsteps on the floor above go. She shut her eyes and focused on the perfume’s music.
‘Cinnamon and cloves.’ Her nose prickled. ‘Oranges and gingerbread.’ Each layer carefully picked out and then, just as carefully, woven back together. ‘Christmas.’
No response. Her answer was too simple.
She pressed her lids tighter. She was good at this. Just as she was good at judging where a pleat should fold, or where a ruffle should gather. And, today of all days, she could not let her father down: her failure would be a bad omen.
She sniffed again, filling her lungs. A thicker note wriggled up through the spice-packed layers. Its smoky heaviness reminded her of the scent that wafted out when church doors opened. A scent she had never smelled in the synagogue Grandpa Nathan herded them all into, when he used to care about such things.
‘Incense.’
Her father released his breath in a gentle sigh.
Liese let her imagination dive back into the workrooms. She conjured up the muslin-draped costumes and pictured herself walking around them, picking out their details. The deep fur collar on an ankle-length coat; silver thread and crystal beads clustering the shoulders on a narrow bodice; filigreed gold worked in layered patterns. She let her thoughts wander past the dummies and over to the idea books that cluttered the studios: history and art collected in faded photographs and coloured plates. Books she had spent hours poring over on quiet afternoons.
Her eyes snapped open. Military frogging, not buttons, to close a jacket, white muffs hanging from jewelled chains like sleeping rabbits.
‘It’s not any Christmas – it’s a Russian one. At the Imperial Court. Girls ice-skating and riding in horse-drawn sledges at midnight. Trips to The Nutcracker and candlelit balls.’
‘You caught it. Well done.’
Paul’s smile at her cleverness lit up the room.
What was wrong with him? Why must he always be on a mission to spoil everything?
Michael had turned into the after-party’s bad fairy, all black looks and muttered curses. Liese watched his fists curl and wished, not for the first time, that the old mischief-loving Michael would come back, not this new version all stamped through with political understanding, whatever that might be. It certainly wasn’t any fun. He had grown spiky, and self-important, and in need of bursting. Once tonight was over, she would tell him that.
The show had been every bit the triumph everyone was praying for. Even Minister Goebbels had thawed when he saw the military touches. When he declared the collection ‘a timely homage to the beauties of Prussia’, no one was fool enough to correct him. Now, two hours after the last model had stalked through the applause, the champagne was flowing, and the order book was brimming. Haus Elfmann was toasting its future; all Michael could do was scowl.
‘How can they fawn like this? Your father’s drooling and mine’s as bad. They’ll both be wearing swastikas next.’
And here we go again.
Liese didn’t bother to hide her sigh. One sight of a uniform or a Party badge and this newly minted Michael flew into a tirade in a voice more suited to a parade ground. She should have been quicker to run down to the milling reception, not let him catch her off guard on the stairs.
‘Can’t you let it go for tonight? Yes, there are more Party officials and officers than we expected. But everyone’s praising the clothes and being perfectly civil.’
Another curse. Thank goodness the stairway’s curve meant Paul couldn’t hear him.
Liese wasn’t a fool, although Michael increasingly behaved as if she was. She knew there was a darker side to the National Socialists than the one currently on display. The Führer’s rise to power three years ago had, in her father’s words, made Germany ‘more secure and more hopeful’ for businessmen like him. It had also released gangs of brown-shirted thugs onto the streets and plastered the city with posters and placards that were unsettling and not to be dwelled on.
As the regime flexed its muscles, people everywhere, including in hard-to-fluster and Party-sceptical Berlin, were growing nervous. Even the Elfmanns, for all their wealth and status, had not escaped the chill.
Liese, to her increasing irritation, was no longer allowed to walk anywhere without a companion. She had also been pulled out of school long before she was due to leave, with no explanation beyond the excuse of ‘difficult times’. True, that was less of an upset than her curtailed freedom to visit the deer runs in Viktoriapark or the ice-cream parlours on Bergmanstraβe. She didn’t miss her lessons: she had learned everything she considered she needed to know in the salon. Pattern-cutting had made her mathematics precise. She spoke French prettily enough to delight French buyers and English clearly enough to charm American clients. Everything else her teachers judged important had been a distraction. It had been more difficult, however, to let go of her friends.
No matter how many invitations Liese sent out, no one came calling. She had thought her classmates must be as confined as she was, until she spied Christa and Anna strolling arm in arm as she sat alone in the car and wondered if she’d perhaps imagined their closeness. Paul was confident the current mood wouldn’t last.
‘All governments crack down in their early years. First, they get into power, then they get heady with it. Once the Führer has the communists and the criminals mopped up, he’ll rein in the excesses. In the meantime, we must all get on and work together. Whatever the Party’s vision for Germany turns out to be, it has to include clothes.’
In light of the salon’s continued success, Liese considered her father’s viewpoint perfectly reasonable, and yet here was Michael, eternally playing the prophet of gloom.
He was fidgeting now, staring at a group of black-uniformed officers as if he expected them to break out their guns and start shooting. ‘He watches too many gangster films’ was Uncle Otto’s excuse. ‘He spends too much time with that idiot group of hotheads and communists he calls friends’ was her father’s.
The company Michael kept was the only thing she ever heard the two men properly argue about. She knew Michael was involved with the KPD, the German Communist Party banned by the Führer. If Michael’s evenings were anything to go by, that group now conducted its business on street corners and in the worst kind of taverns. He could talk her to death about the ‘honesty of its values’ and ‘its understanding of the true meaning of society’ if she’d let him. He was desperate for her to join too, but he was hardly an advertisement for it: from what Liese could see, involvement with the KPD sucked the joy out of everything. Michael’s sense of humour had totally vanished; his all-encompassing allegiance had even managed to ruin their visit to the summer’s Olympic Games.
It was weeks now since the opening ceremony’s debacle, but she was still struggling to forgive him. She would tell him that tonight too. How the memory of its upset was still so raw she could slap him.