“Bluthexe?”
“Blood witch.”
“For crying out loud – the woman was dying!”
“I know. She was saying the storm went on the whole time Baba Lenka was ill, that it raged and raged as she tried to send her demons to someone else on the wind—”
“What a load of old codswallop.”
“Aye, well, that’s as maybe, but…” She sighed. “The locals were scared daft, Pete. She was very much alone, I think.”
“Apart from these old folk?”
“She said they’d been travelling for days—”
“Bloody hell, poor old baggage with no one to look after her. Managed to strip the house, though, haven’t they – the locals?”
“No, I don’t think so. It looks like her things have been piled into the casket; it’s stuffed with—”
“You’ve looked inside, then?”
“Only to check all’s as it should be. You don’t take anything out of a coffin, you know? To be honest, it’s a good thing we came or I don’t think she’d ’ave been given a proper burial. They really are scared out of their wits of her round ’ere, you know? From what I can gather, the villagers wanted to tip her down the well. Thank God for Jakub and Vanda, that’s all I can say.”
“Good thing you kept in touch. Who are these old folk anyway? The ones who don’t speak German very well and travelled for days? Where did they come from?”
She shook her head. “Further back in my family than Baba Lenka. I don’t know, but I’m grateful to them. Anyway, I think they want to come tomorrow to wash the body, and good, frankly, because it’s in a terrible mess.”
“You looked?”
“Her hand had poked through the blanket…” She lowered her voice, but I heard well enough. “God, Pete, her skin’s turned an ’orrible shade of greeny yellow, and the tissue’s so thin it’s split apart over the bones. I only pulled the top part back, and I wish I ’adn’t, because the eyes are still open. I nearly had a bloody heart attack.”
They fell into numb silence for a while, watching the flames spark into life and rubbing their hands to get warm.
“She’s got no hair, either. And there’s this strange silver ring on her thumb, kind of like runes all the way round the band, and a little black sun sign etched into it.”
“Maybe she’d want you to have it?”
“God, no! You can’t take anything off a dead body!”
“I just thought maybe she’d have given it to you if she could have done?”
“No, Pete. No. It’s not something you’d want.”
“Okay, okay… I were only saying!”
Around about then, it began to filter through that something about all this was a bit off. My mother had never said much about her upbringing, nor had I known my maternal grandparents. Orphaned, she’d been brought up in various foster homes and remembered nothing much before that. But she could speak German and quite well, too. I’d never heard her use it before, so that was something new. And I also learned there was a huge and possibly terrible secret surrounding Baba Lenka, which no one was going to explain. I mean, I’d hardly heard of her despite the fact she was my great-grandma. We had birthday cards from Jakub and Vanda in Munich, described only as ‘distant cousins we ought to keep in touch with’, but that was the only connection ever mentioned.
“It’s best you don’t know,” my mother had said on the flight over.
“But why don’t they want to bury her like normal people? What did you mean?”
She and my father had exchanged a charged look over my head. The plane had been a jet propeller. And in between each peak of the Alps, it plunged as heavily as a whale before climbing noisily upwards to scale the next. My stomach was all screwed up. I found myself praying when the nose pointed skywards like a rocket.
That flight was the first part of the nightmare – the first recurring dream I’d have for decades afterwards, although it paled in comparison to the second part; and when the final part of the nightmare arrived, it might have been better if the plane had never made it at all. I often think it’s a blessing we don’t know, or some of us don’t know, what is to come or we would not be able to face it. Yet somehow we do. We do face things and adjust, finding a strength and courage we never knew we had.
“It’s something to do with the War,” Dad shouted above the drone of the engine.
Please, God, don’t let those propellers stop turning…
“You’ve heard about the Iron Curtain, haven’t you, Eva – the divide between east and west Europe? Well, before the Second World War, there was a country called Bohemia just east of the German border. But the Germans who lived there – the Sudetens – were exiled after the Second World War to Bavaria in southern Germany. So, in effect, where Baba Lenka used to live doesn’t exist anymore. It looks the same, but the villages are all Czech.”
“Why did they have to leave?”
“Because a lot of people died there, Eva. So now there’s a line between the two countries, and Bohemia’s been incorporated into the Czech Republic.”
“Why did Baba Lenka go to Germany and not stay in the Czech Republic? Was she a Nazi?”
Beside me my mother stiffened, her glance flicking around the cabin to see if anyone had heard.
“Where the hell did you get that from? None of our family were Nazis,” she hissed. “They were just innocent people caught up in something they didn’t understand, shunted from pillar to bloody post.”
“So why can’t she be buried like a normal German person, then? I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Eva! Because…” My mother, who spoke with a broad Yorkshire accent and had never even been to Germany, sighed heavily. “It’s just as it is, Eva. Baba Lenka wasn’t liked, and there’s an end to it. Some say she’s more Czech than German, others say she was a double agent, a traitor, whatever you call it.”
“And some say she was an old witch,” said Dad.
My mother shot him a look, and I sensed the conversation was closed. Besides, I was focusing intently on a prayer to God that the plane wouldn’t crash. A monumental spike of black rock loomed perilously close. There was a small hut at the top of it, jutting out from an overhanging crag, and I wondered very briefly who had built it and why and how. Out of the tiny porthole windows, surreal white-tipped mountains dazzled in distant sunlight as the jet slowly climbed and the engines screamed. Finally, it tipped over the apex. There was a collective, silent exhalation of relief – before, with a stomach-lurching plunge, it dropped through an air lock. People screamed and overhead lockers flew open, drinks were spilled and shaking hands re-lit cigarettes. The journey was interminable, sickly sweet with smoke, and heady with whisky and wine.
There was no choice – we had to go to this funeral, and there, as my mother was fond of saying, was an end to it. Two days. Three at most. It would soon be over.
The cemetery was quite a way out of the village, perched high on the hill and well away from the church. The priest had not been happy about burying her, either. There had been a loud exchange of words at the farm door about it this morning.
I didn’t understand German, but, fortunately, neither did my dad, so Mum had been forced to explain. She sounded weary. “He’ll do the ceremony, he says. But not in the churchyard because she weren’t a Christian. It’s to be in the cemetery outside the village. We’ll ’ave to settle for it, at any rate, and we’ve to pay him.”