The Final Chapter

This was the ending to the book that I put in my first draft and then edited out because I wanted the ending snappier. But so many people have asked me if Hanno and Effi did get together, that I thought I'd put it in here.

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Last Train From Kummersdorf
By Leslie Wilson

The Final Chapter

At first Effi didn’t know what she’d do without him. She just half-slept in the apartment, she hugged Cornelius, she clung to Papa when he came home. She woke up thinking she was still in the forest with Hanno, then started crying because he wasn’t there. Sometimes Papa would hear her and come in, he’d hold her till at last she fell asleep again. For a while she couldn’t even bear to listen to jazz because it made her think of Hanno. And Pierre and Aunt Annelie. She cried for them a lot now that Hanno was gone. She talked about them again and again to Papa. Then a letter came from Frankfurt, via a US soldier. Hanno was learning to draw. He was helping his mother. He said he missed Effi and Bruno and Cornelius. He said it was nice to be with his sister again. He said he thought about her a lot. So she wrote back, the same kind of stuff. Papa was sending food parcels to the family. Frau Frisch wrote polite little letters of thanks. Effi still wasn’t sure that she liked Papa, or her.
In July the Americans withdrew from Leipzig, just as Papa had said they would. Papa was posted to Berlin. They had a posh apartment in Charlottenburg. They drove into the Russian zone and looked at the ruins of the bar in Prenzlauer Berg. They went to Wannsee and saw the villa. An American general was living there with his family.
‘But it’s yours,’ said Papa.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Effi.
It was weird, and uncomfortable to be in Berlin, though people came out of the ruins who Papa really wanted to see. Anti-Nazis who’d survived the war. People who understood. The letter came from Ida Rupf when they were there. They were living with her sister in her house near Frankfurt, times were hard, but better than wartime, said Ida. She hoped they’d soon be able to go back to Silesia.  And then in August the Americans dropped the atom bombs on Japan, that was dreadful, but it ended the war.
They spent another six months in Berlin before Papa was demobbed. He took Effi and Cornelius back to America. She was in California, learning to be an American girl, going to an American school with kids whose parents were in Hollywood, some of the kids acted in the movies. There were other German refugees in Hollywood, some of them were Papa’s friends, but their kids weren’t at her school. She wanted just to be the same as all the rest of the girls, but she couldn’t quite manage it. None of the other girls had gone hungry, or sheltered from bombs. None of them had walked past a policeman wondering if he might arrest them, none of them realised how lucky they were to have beds to sleep in and food to eat and clean water to wash in.
Ida Rupf wrote again. They were never going back to Silesia. The Allies had given it to the Poles to make up for the eastern Polish territory that Stalin had taken for Russia. That’s hard, said Ida, and sometimes I think about that chest full of silver in the garden. I wonder if anyone’s ever found it? But who cares about silver, or even about a hotel, if they have their life? It’s only the mountains I miss. They were my home. Barbara is at school now, she’s doing well. But she cries a lot. It’s probably good for her to cry. Life goes on. We’ve got some hens and a goat, that’s not bad going. I hope that when things got better we can take paying guests, this is a pretty little place, just right for weekends away from the city.
Hanno kept writing. His mother was working in a shop, she thought he should aim to go into the police force, but he wasn’t going to. He was back at school now: the art teacher didn’t agree with the things he was doing with Michael Hildbrand. He was ignoring the art teacher. He was saving little bits of wood from going in the fire and doing carvings, really small ones, but he was getting better. Only he wanted to work with metal, he said. He wanted to do really big sculptures in metal. He sent her some drawings of the ideas he had in his head. She wrote back and told him about the singing and dancing lessons she had after school. She liked those.
She was just sixteen when Papa got her a movie test. She had a small role as a kid in a detective film with Humphrey Bogart. It made it easier at school. She made friends with the other girls who acted.
When she told Hanno about the movie she remembered how she’d told him that he’d come to see her at the cinema. She wished she hadn’t said that. She’d imagined them apart. It made her feel as if it was her fault, but of course it wasn’t.
The film did well, and the studio was on the verge of signing her up properly when things suddenly got bad in America. There was this committee. The Un-American Activities Committee. They wanted to weed out Communism in America and Papa was going to have to go and talk to it. There was a question everyone was being asked, and whether or not they stayed in work depended on the answer: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ Well, of course Papa had been. That was the reason he’d had to leave Germany. It would be OK if he ‘co-operated’ with the committee. That meant, telling them all about other actors who were Communists and ruining their careers. And if he refused to ‘co-operate’, there’d be no more work for him in Hollywood.
‘But of course I won’t,’ he said to her, and then: ‘I never thought it’d happen here.’
‘What’ll we do, then?’ she asked him.
‘We’ll leave,’ he said. ‘I’m lucky, I’ve got the option of leaving. I’ve always been lucky that way.’ Then he fell silent. Effi knew he was thinking of Mama. She put her arms round him. They’d had a lot of catching up to do, the two of them. It hadn’t always been easy. She’d been jealous of his girlfriends – though none of them had been serious, yet. And there’d been the usual rows about what she was allowed to do. It had been part of her American girl act to have rows with him, to come into school and say: ‘My Pop doesn’t understand me.’ He got angry easily, sometimes he was really unreasonable, not parent-unreasonable. Now she gave him a kiss where his hair was thinning, thought: You can be pretty tough going yourself sometimes, Effi.
He pulled her hand to his lips and kissed it.
‘If I’d been a policeman like Hanno’s father,’ he said. ‘If I’d had no friends abroad and hadn’t been able to take my work abroad with me – My God, Effi, it never stops. And I used to believe in Communism, and there were terrible camps in Russia, just like in our own country.’
He said ‘our own country,’ though she was a US citizen now, too.
‘I’m not going back to Germany,’ he said. ‘I’ve been writing to the film studios in England, I want to go there. It’ll be less money, though. And Cornelius will have to go into quarantine kennels for six months.’
‘Poor Cornelius. But I can’t leave him behind.’
‘I know that. And there’s your own work - you’ll be tarred with the same brush as me. You’ll have to start again in England.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I want to be with you.’

They did have less money in England, and there was still rationing. There were bomb-sites everywhere, not as bad as Germany, but the fireweed grew in among them and you could look up and see wallpaper and fireplaces on what were now the outside walls of houses. But Effi felt more like herself here, she realised how strange all the luxury, the unhurt housing, had been.  They went back to Chelsea, to a house this time, and one day Effi walked along the river where she’d danced with Mama and for a moment she thought Mama was beside her, her hand in hers. Only Mama was gone for ever. No, thought Effi. She’s with me for ever. Everyone says I’m the image of her, and I’ll work in England as she couldn’t.
Papa had written a symphony, and it was being performed. In London. He was really excited. It did well. Effi went to an English stage school where she learned to speak with an English accent again. She liked the stage school. One of the teachers was a Jewish refugee from Germany: there were kids there whose parents had escaped from Germany before the war. Cornelius came out of quarantine. Effi got little roles on the stage, then bigger ones. Ones with singing. She was really busy.
She wasn’t writing so much to Hanno. Only Papa kept writing to him. Encouraging him with his art, discussing things with him. Once she had a row with him about it. She said he cared more about Hanno than he did about her. Papa shouted at her and stormed out of the house. He came back half an hour later and said: ‘Never say that again.’
She was seventeen. She had a part in a British film. Another crime movie, she had to be the detective’s girlfriend, a singer in a sleazy bar. She was going out with Paul Hart, who was playing one of the criminals. He was twenty, dark and nice-looking. He came from a theatrical family who all had money. He took her driving in his father’s sports car. She stopped writing to Hanno altogether. She wanted to forget about all that stuff, it was years ago, anyway. It was bad to remember it. She had her life in England ahead of her.
She was eighteen, acting in a West End show. Papa told her Hanno was coming to England once he’d done his exams. Michael Hildebrand thought he should study at Central St Martin’s.Papa had said Hanno could come and stay with them. She was furious with Papa. It was her turn to storm out of the house, shouting: ‘I don’t want to be German any more. I don’t want him. Don’t you understand?’
It didn’t make any difference. Papa just said: ‘You come from Germany, Effi, and you’ll have to make peace with that, as I have to. And why deny the past? You should be proud of it.’
‘Just because you’re writing the kind of music you like  now,’ said Effi angrily, ‘you think you can do anything. I don’t need him, I’ve got a boyfriend.’
Papa said: ‘I care about that lad. So do you, though you’re pretending you don’t.’
It opened a small, anxious, childish hole inside her to think about Hanno. And she had her work to get on with. She thought, well maybe he won’t pass his exams. He did, though. He was coming, in a month, in three weeks, in two weeks.
He was there. She’d come in from rehearsal and Papa had brought him from Victoria. Papa let him in through the door and then went back to pay off the taxi, leaving the two of them alone together.
Hanno had grown tall, he was still nice-looking and he had a determined look that she didn’t remember, but he wasn’t sure of himself in the easy way Paul was. She remembered how he’d come in the door of the stable all those years ago. Any moment now it might all start again, she might tell him she had a gun and was ready to shoot him if he started any funny business. Then Cornelius, old Cornelius now, and so deaf he didn’t hear the postman any more, woke up and caught Hanno’s scent.
He went mad. He was on his hind legs, slobbering all over Hanno’s face, barking, squeaking, panting. And now Hanno was laughing, and  when he laughed something melted inside Effi. She remembered how they’d put their arms round each other on the river bank.
She didn’t kiss him now, she didn’t know him any longer. But she smiled at him, and he smiled back. Suddenly she realised how little Paul meant to her, he was just someone to have fun with. But Hanno – he and she went back a long way together. And now he was in England, he was going to be part of her English life. It’d be really good to get to know him again.