“Shh. Later.” He tosses Violet’s valise into the boot and swings around front.
The car springs from the clutch. Violet grips the door frame. The air is cooler than she expects, rushing against the side of her face from around the windscreen. She leans forward. “Is it war? Are the borders closed already?”
Lionel glances in the mirror. “Just let me get us out of the city.”
The car whips about a corner, and a shout echoes from the pavement. Lionel accelerates. The wind roars against Violet’s eardrums. She puts up her hand to secure her hat.
“Is there anyone behind us?” asks Lionel quietly.
Violet cranes her head. A pair of headlamps. “Yes.”
The engine growls ravenously. The door frame vibrates under Violet’s hand. She focuses her eyes on the small winged figure perched at the edge of the bonnet, whose mercury body stretches forward in a perpetual leap of faith.
Another turn, and another, small narrow streets without lamps. Lionel drives at a ruinous speed, without speaking, without blinking, his eyes fixed and determined on the pavement ahead. Violet’s feet are numb from pressing into the floorboards. Berlin passes by in a charcoal blur, the last she will see of it for many years.
The streets lengthen, the buildings thin. Violet catches a glimpse of the horizon, purple-gray in the moment before sunrise. As suddenly as they’ve begun, they’re in the suburbs, and then a field opens up to the right, swallowed shortly by a forest. Lionel slows the car and pulls to the side of the road, beneath the black branches. For a minute, he sits still, breathing deeply, and then he asks Violet if she will find his cigarette case from his jacket pocket.
The jacket lies on the floorboard, inside out. Violet picks it up and finds the case. She runs her fingers over the engraved Roman monogram: LRP. The P must be his middle name. What does it stand for? She has no idea. Silently she hands it to him, and he selects a cigarette and lights it in methodical movements. The sky is beginning to lighten, illuminating the clean white of the cigarette paper, the slender stream of smoke.
“Grant’s dead,” Lionel says abruptly. “Your husband’s dead.”
The air stops in Violet’s lungs. Perhaps her heart stops, too: she’s not sure.
“Good,” she says, but her voice quivers.
“The police have found out, obviously. We’re heading south, to Switzerland.”
“Why south?”
“We can’t go north. It’s flat and populated and obvious. And if Germany mobilizes, it will shortly be swarming with soldiers, and all the ports will close, and every train and road and bloody loaf of bread will be requisitioned.” He sucks hard on his cigarette, staring ahead.
Violet gathers herself. Begins to breathe again. “How did it happen?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He puts his two hands on the steering wheel and drums it with his thumbs. “Does it matter?”
She thinks for a moment. “No.”
“Then don’t ask any more questions, hmm?” He stubs out the smoke and turns the ignition.
Grant’s dead. Lionel’s flat voice. Your husband’s dead. Her mind hovers numbly around the words, poking at them, trying to determine if they’re real. Walter. Dr. Walter Grant, her husband, eminent physical chemist. His brilliant eyes shut, his famous and flexible brain locked in rigor mortis. This sick feeling in the pit of her belly: grief, or relief, or disbelief?
It could not be. Walter could not be dead. Surely she had misheard him.
The car bumps back onto the road and gathers speed. The sky is lightening more. Lionel switches off the headlamps. In the glow of sunrise, the dashboard gleams like warm honey.
Violet asks: “Where did you get the automobile?”
“I borrowed it,” says Lionel.
? ? ?
THEY DRIVE for two hours before Lionel stops at a village for petrol. While he fills up the hungry Daimler, Violet finds a bakery and buys a dozen sweet rolls. There are apples in a basket on the counter, four pfennigs each. She buys six.
Lionel keeps to local roads, narrow and unpaved, consulting a map every so often. Violet eats two apples and a roll, but already it’s too hot for food. She asks if they have any water.
“In the back,” says Lionel. “I filled two jugs back in Seehausen.”
Violet finds the jugs and opens one, and they pass it back and forth between them. “You can sleep if you like,” says Lionel.
“You’re the one who should be sleeping. I don’t think you’ve slept more than four hours in the past three days.”
“I’ll sleep tonight.”
Violet doesn’t mean to sleep, she’s never been a tremendous sleeper, naps are almost unknown to her. But somewhere in the low rumble of the automobile engine and the thick heat of the air and the nearby comfort of Lionel’s body, her thoughts drift and settle. She wakes with a start when the car slows to a stop.