11 September 1915

My room is sordid, it was once used for cattle, and I am running out of money to pay the rent. The village shop charges me more than the locals. Going to the Vineyard is the highlight of my day. Life is in parenthesis. The hours go slowly but the days go fast.

16 December 1915

Christmas is coming and I will spend it in exile. Sometimes I think I am being punished. I am like the woman in the Bible who was stoned for adultery. You can never shake off the idea of sin if you had a religious upbringing like the one we had. But Christ stepped in to save the adulteress. He called her persecutors hypocrites. ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ The Bible has the cruelty and the answers. I need that heroic intervention, that Saviour.

24 February 1916

Magdalena, the woman in charge, has asked me to teach French as well as scrub floors. I have no money left and can’t write home for more, but she says she will pay the rent on my room and give me dinner in return for ten hours’ work a day. I have no choice. It’s better than the camp.

Anything is better than Deutsch-Bod, where I saw that humans are not human after all.

8 May 1916

Had a dream of Georges last night. We were in our old apartment near Pl des Ternes, but it was smaller. Went to escape to bedroom but there was nothing, just air and a drop to the street. Could hear G behind me. ‘You are my wife! I demand that you stay!’ And so on.

Awoke in a sweat. Remembered Anton’s face when I tried to tell him about G that first night in Vienna, but he could only stare at my body. Of course I loved him from that moment, that look of wonder, when I held him in my hand.

Fought to stay awake so as not to fall back into that old nightmare of having failed A. Too late. Woke again with tears on my face.

What a man. What have I done to him.

If I had been able to conceive, it would have been different. Then I would have made him marry me. I know I could have persuaded him.

I wanted him to have children. I still do. There is something in him worth reproducing.

I say that as someone who at one moment in my life, in the camp, thought the world would be improved if all humanity were dead.

31 May 1916

Teaching French four hours this morning. The women in the retreat are casualties of peace, not war. Magda calls them her lost sheep, but they don’t act as a flock. Most of them are perverse and difficult.

The siege of Verdun continues, I see from the paper. I wonder how many men I know, friends, acquaintances, have died there.

A beautiful afternoon, nevertheless. Magda has persuaded the local police that the Vineyard can look after the French Jew spy. So I was allowed to go up to the church under the eye of little Andrea. Stood in the doorway and looked back over the village and woods.

I felt His presence.

1 July 1916

A day of great peace. It’s sometimes when I’m not trying that I feel Him near. There are moments of feeling at one with the world that nothing else could possibly explain.

Like that day in the camp when I first knew that I’d never go back to the old life. After what I’d seen. And me in the ‘easy’ block, not with the Russians, as they kept telling us.

The certainty that winter morning that I would need to find a bigger comfort, another way of looking at our short lives.

Before, I tried to make sense of things by love and choice and being with the right people – also by music.

That day on the freezing ground with no shoes I understood that the most sublime moments of Bach or Mozart feel that way because they are at the gateway of the divine. That is why they both thrill us and leave us yearning.

The courage to step through the gateway … I was never sure I had that.

3 November 1916

Have decided to apply to live in the Vineyard. It is the life I want. If I work hard they will feed and house me. I need no more than work and faith. That is what has sustained the best people since the beginning of time. And I have friends among the women here. That is the third part of what makes a life. Or mine from now on, at least.

My life seems divided into the sacred (now) and the profane before the war. I picture the rooms in Vienna, in the shadow of the gasometers. I remember how I tried to make them homely, though not living there myself. And Baden, where at least we were as one, like a married couple, though with an edge of sinful excitement.

Lying on the bed, he’d talk to me of Friedrich, his friend, and about his brother Gerhard and people he’d met, but I knew him so much better than they did. I pointed this out to him one day and he was taken aback. I think he believed that the games we played, the fantasies and imaginings, were a separate part of him, not who he really was – when in fact they were the truest part. Perhaps it was a surprise to him to see how far we’d come together, how much he had revealed.

When he left for Paris, the last time I saw him, I urged him to go. It was not that I was so ambitious for his career, which was in any case quite settled by then. Did I suspect that he would not be able to come back? Was I in some way hoping for an end? And if so, why? Because I was afraid of disappointing him?

I don’t think so. I would not have felt so much pain if I had had some unacknowledged motive lying deep beneath my conscious thoughts.

It’s when I’m awake, by day, that I feel the grief and the guilt. If he had managed to get back from Paris before they came for me … I suppose we would have sworn ourselves to one another. We would have written, arranged to meet at some future, unknown time after the war. But then … I can’t say.

The police saved me from a decision. Those two rough men at the door. I thought already he’d be better off without me, though I wasn’t sure that I would ever have had the strength to tell him. And then I was spared the need. I do believe he will prosper without me if he survives the war. He will be a father and an example.

I pray for him each night. I pray for the shells and bullets to kill other men, not him.

17 January 1917

I have been accepted into the order and put into a tiny room, which I share with Andrea. A happy day for me. I have quite stopped thinking of home, even of my sisters, though I do pray for them as well.

25 March 1917

At last I have put on some weight. The food here is plain, but there is plenty of it from the farms nearby. I think Anton would approve of me like this, more like the girl he first saw undress in his attic room.

I used to pray that he would stop haunting my dreams. But he is in my blood. Day and night. Looking back at the first few times we spent together … I think I made myself mysterious on purpose. I even hinted that I had some great secret in the hope that it would make me seem more romantic or attractive to him.

It was easy to do. To give him small glimpses into my past. Half-finished stories. Tantalising. It was something I had done since girlhood, to compete with my sisters. The difference was that by now I had lived enough to have stories to refer to. And Anton seemed to love it – his eyes widened – so where was the harm?

The truth was that my only secrets were mundane. Marriage to a man who changed, and drank too much and ceased to love me. A wretched inability to have children. A longing for love and excitement and transcendence. Restlessness. And indifference to what other people thought of me.

And then to be loved so extremely by A. I believed he had found something wonderful in me, some glorious essence that was mine alone – yet also perhaps purer than I could ever be. Purer than I really was.

Oh, my darling … That first night, when he was ashamed of himself and I reassured him that we had time. He told me later that he was afraid of not being what he was supposed to be. Then he smiled and said, ‘But which of us really is?’ And I felt my soul touch his.

Later, there were times when I felt the weight of his love almost unbearable. His scrutiny. I felt his eyes burn my flesh. They were unblinking when he touched my thigh, examining the marks on my skin as though they were some rune or hieroglyph he had to understand …

I could write a letter now and somehow it would reach him in Vienna, even if it’s not until the war is over. The temptation is so strong that I sometimes feel my hand twitching above the paper.

But I will never leave this house, so what is the point of making him unhappy, of stirring up feelings that by now he must have sealed off, shut down … When I find the temptation winning, I go out into the old vineyard and walk down the rows of vines, stumbling on the dry clay of the overturned soil. I feel like someone in the Bible, though I can never think quite who.

The seed fell on stony ground … Ruth and Boaz …

The woman with an issue of blood. Yes, probably her.

11 December 1917

I have moved into a lovely room that overlooks the gates. I will be happy here, on my own. There is an oil painting in the corridor outside of the Blessed Virgin. She is the opposite of me, I suppose, a virgin yet a mother.

I am 41 today. Even if I had been fertile, I’m getting too old to be a mother now. I have no regrets. It was not my destiny, not my task.

Mary’s lot was to bear the child and to lose Him. To cradle Him once as a baby and then as a man at the foot of the cross. I feel with her. I ache with her in every breath she took.

One day after death perhaps I will be united with my A in heaven, as it’s promised. If not – if it’s to be the dark, and existence was all along a joke at the expense of our humankind – then Amen.

8 April 1918

Movement in the war. Perhaps an end in sight before the year is over. It doesn’t matter who is ‘victorious’. All is already lost.

24 October 1918

Awoke feverish again. Went down for morning prayer but was too weak and had to come back to my room.