by Ben Pastor
“What do Frau Sommer and his colleagues at the clinic think?”
“They are keeping quiet, Martin. They thought the world of the ‘Herr Doktor Professor’, but would rather not speculate.”
Nina sat down at one end of a small sofa. Its delicate chintz upholstery paled against the blaze of roses and peonies that dominated a spindly round table, on which her enamelled cigarette case created the only other spot of colour.
“May I join you?” Bora asked, and took a seat at the opposite end of the sofa. Soberly, he added, “It might not have been a mere cardiac arrest, Nina. I beg you to consider it as a possibility, that’s all.”
For a moment she seemed tired, more so than he’d ever seen her. Not older, not less beautiful: only very tired. She averted those brilliant blue-green eyes of hers from him for as long as it took for her to accept his words. Slowly she nodded, wordless and poised, diplomat’s daughter and wife of a German general that she was. Bora saw pain travel across her face, recognizing from experience the hurt you feel when you try not to display it.
“It will be best not to share this with Saskia for now,” she said, pressing her lips together afterwards as if to underline the need for silence.
His taking her hand and kissing it was, for them, a gesture so intense and so tender that they both drew enormous comfort from it.
“Is everything all right, Nina?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, dear.”
“I’m not worried about tonight, you know.”
“Of course not.”
“It’s just routine. I anticipate being back for dinner.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
They still looked at each other in suspense, because she clearly feared for him. But he sensed there was something else, too. The unsaid anchored them to their seats; it all depended on who would break the bounds of restraint first. Bora would not. On the contrary, he regained complete control of himself. Turned slightly towards her, he evaluated her beauty with the serenity of a man who, feeling no sexual attraction, has a clear eye. Despite her fifty years, she struck him as surprisingly young, even younger than he was – and now about to travel back to an empty house where an old man had withdrawn from everything because his son had died and his stepson had been mutilated. Out of the blue, he thought of the French bar where, sitting across from him, La Mome had asked him in her liquid voice (she was a singer and a whore), “Do you think it’s fun, letting an old man fuck you?”
Why am I thinking that? How dare I think such things in the presence of my mother?
“I invited Saskia to come and stay with us in Leipzig, Martin, but I doubt she will. Her annuity allows her to retain the house in Dahlem; all her memories are there. Incidentally, it seems that Uncle’s papers were at least in part entrusted to a colleague, whose name however is unknown to her.”
“It’s better like that, Nina.”
“A colleague.” Olbertz, or someone else? Surely Uncle had left instructions; it could be counterproductive if Saskia enquired about his papers now.
Faced with his mother’s beauty, Bora wondered how she felt about his imperfections, those she knew well and the more recent ones. The way one of his incisors slightly overlapped the other (which Dikta, however, had found irresistible), the first grey hairs (“thirteen, fourteen”, the army barber had informed him, unasked, two weeks earlier, when a trip to Berlin wasn’t even in God’s mind – or maybe in God’s mind alone) … the visible scars – the Polish one across his temple, the fresher ones on his neck – and especially the glove shielding the artificial left hand. Bora was acutely aware of the useless guilt he felt for giving her back, damaged, the body she had formed whole. He was far from right – Nina felt nothing but love for the son who had survived and was still in mortal danger. But because of the intensity of his admiration for her, Bora could not – for all his facility with concepts and words – explain himself to the woman who had given birth to him. It was for this reason, and not because he thought it inopportune, that he’d told her nothing about Dikta at the start, not even of their civil wedding. Even now, after Dikta had thrown him away, he found no means to share how he felt. He settled for giving her an impression of solidity on which she could count, now that her husband was lost in mourning and Peter’s young widow had emotionally withdrawn from her. After all that had happened in the last two years, Nina was now the true reason why he felt that he should live. Dikta had been, too, until the year before; and the unreachable Nora Murphy had seemed so, too, fleetingly, in Rome. Bora sat there with his mother, while just outside a world – their world – had been thrown into upheaval and in good part destroyed. He’d say I will take care of you, if only he believed that events would allow.
Nina clasped her knees with her hands, staring in front of her. “I saw an old friend again last night. He came to fetch me at the station.”
A few words, in her impeccable native English. Bora heard them sink into him like a self-evident formula, a code needing no interpretation. He had something like a flash of knowledge, and with it came a sense of unique privilege that gave him goosebumps.
He did not ask her anything. But when Nina nervously reached for a cigarette from the enamelled case, he took out his lighter (it’d been Peter’s, so he held it in his fist to keep her from recognizing it, and grieving), and lit it for her.
She really did not know how to smoke; it was only her small act of rebellion.
“With your permission, I’ll have one too,” Bora said. He usually went without, but always kept the Chesterfields in his breast pocket. It was his only luxury at the front, and now he lit the small flame again with a click. After a drag, he quietly observed: “It isn’t easy to live with the General. I know full well.”
He was referring to Sickingen’s aversion to smoking, naturally. But also to the rest. Nina seized the opportunity, and cautiously followed his sophisticated balancing act. “It would not have been appreciably easier for you with your natural father, Martin. What I loved about him – his being temperamental – would have been an obstacle between you.”
“I’m a damn difficult son.” Bora smiled as he said it. “And this time I was even late in arriving. Forgive me. I’m pleased they came to fetch you at the station.”
“Yes, I was glad also.”
Her nearly telling him more moved him deeply. They had never been so close, never conversed so intimately. Too introverted to speak about himself and his affairs, mannerly and laconic, he was nevertheless the son who, when asked how he was, invariably answered “fine”.
“Do I know him, Nina?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m pleased anyway.”
They smoked silently for a while. He reckoned the measure of her loneliness by the fact that she had broached such a private subject with her son; she had probably never even told Grandmother Ashworth-Douglas, her own mother. Bora did not presume to deserve her confidence, but felt honoured, and certainly passed no judgement. He was not jealous of her, because he knew that nothing could come between them.
“His name is Max Kolowrat.”
Bora nodded in acknowledgement. He was a renowned journalist and traveller, a former war correspondent who’d lived in half the world, and had during the Weimar days severely criticized the prevailing culture. Bora had read his thrilling African chronicles from the Italian campaign of ’35.
“He now lives in Berlin.” Looking at him with her head slightly inclined towards her shoulder, she seemed sad – but in a different way from her mourning. “I detest feeling powerless. And I should not saddle you with this.”
“You should.”
Blushing, Nina once more turned away. “He travelled to Leipzig when they gave you up as missing – or much worse – at Stalingrad. I had not seen him in years, perhaps twenty-five or more. He asked how he could help. How? My first-born was lost: no one could help me. But I appreciated his asking. I don’t know if it was out of vanity that I allowed
him to speak to me. I always thought that if you listened to a man … if you let him know that you were listening … Vanity is morally wrong and tasteless in equal measure. I have always tried to be mindful about these things. The impression we women give, at times – perhaps we should be more aloof than engaging.”
“Nina, most of us males aren’t worth such worries. You alone are the judge of whether he is worth it.”
“Oh, Martin. You were lost. After Stalingrad fell, the General spent his days locked in his study, speaking to no one. Peter of course was still in Russia, we didn’t know where exactly, but … Margaretha had just found out she was pregnant, and she unexpectedly panicked. I was dealing with it all as best I could. The only one to keep her wits was Benedikta. And not because she didn’t care for you. She helped me run things, to keep up the expected social obligations – and the pretence of serenity; because as long as there was no official word, you might still be alive. That was when your father had a row with her, because he knew better than most what it was like in Stalingrad, how unlikely that you’d survived. ‘If Martin is meant to come back, he will’– that was the extent of her answer. And she would not let him see her weep.”
What a mess we left behind at home, even at Stalingrad. It was Bora’s turn to avoid his mother’s eyes.
“You should know … I never wanted to be the one who came back, Nina. I very much hoped it’d be the opposite.”
“The opposite? Please, stop thinking in those terms! Do you really believe that if you had left your life in Stalingrad” – she couldn’t bring herself to use the verb “die” in reference to her sons – “Peter would be spared? It isn’t so. I am so deeply grateful that you did come back. Seeing you at the hospital in Prague was like giving birth to you all over again. But I left you to Benedikta in Prague, because you belonged to each other and needed each other.”
“For all the good it did me.”
Bora felt sad for his mother and, like Max Kolowrat, he, too, wondered how he could help. He said, “I believe you must go beyond grief, Nina; even beyond serenity, and try to live as happily as you possibly can.” The cigarette in her hand was burning out, so he gently took it from her and extinguished it in the ashtray. “Old men is all you’ve known.”
“In 1915, after my two years of full mourning, Max was there, convalescing from a war wound. Formally, and insistently. Never once alone with me. But I’d promised the General I would marry him.”
“Because he courted you before the Maestro, and because when he died the Maestro asked him to take his place? Come now, Nina!”
“Those were different times.”
“Yes, times have changed.”
Again that pain, that restraint on her part, that sense of obligation Bora knew so well. “Martin, I cannot do this to your father.”
“Which one of the two? … Anyway, you can. Dikta didn’t believe me when I told her I’d always been faithful to her; so you see, it isn’t worth it. There are many other forms of betrayal.” He had to look her in the eyes when he said it. “Whatever you decide, Nina, whoever you choose, I am on your side.”
This was something he could tell her. Peter couldn’t have; he would never have encouraged her so calmly. But Bora’s loyalty was to his mother. He relished being on her side – a serene and secure complicity. Not that he was angry at the General – not exactly. But, between the two, he knew who to choose. He’d sworn no oath to him.
“Time for my appointment,” he said lightly. He put out what remained of his cigarette in the ashtray, and rose. Without hurrying, he retrieved his cap from the sofa where he’d placed it at his side, and put it on. “I’ll be back soon,” he said, smiling.
8:30 P.M.
Once outside the door, however, he was seized by panic. He paused at the top of the stairs and closed his eyes in order to calm himself down quickly – fear will come in through the smallest hole, if you let it. When he’d offered himself to his mother as guarantor and protector, he’d unexpectedly laid himself open to fear. Is this the coming storm? Christ, I must pull away. Pull away from all things, even from my sixth sense. Regain some emotional distance. I’ve been in storms before – but the way I feel now, if Salomon has the unhappy idea of waiting downstairs to collar me, I may not be able to restrain myself.
Fortunately for both of them, Salomon was nowhere in sight. Bora stopped at the desk to ask if anyone had called for him from the airfield, or if there were any other messages (there were none), and to deposit the diary from his briefcase in the safe. Once out of the hotel, solemn and battered, he turned right on Wilhelmstrasse; the fifteen-minute walk would give him time to collect his wits before he reached Nebe’s office by the Spree.
It was still light outside, despite the hour; the sky was clear. It was past closing time, and the quarter seemed deserted – but Bora wondered how many people might still be working in the beehive that was the government offices: a world inside a world, with a remnant of quiet, invisible activity. The wide pavement stretched before him like a starched ribbon.
He arrived at the once glorious Wilhelmplatz; the Foreign Ministry stood there looking ominous after being damaged by fire. The raids had not spared the Chancellery, either: its narrowness belied its true dimensions, which extended the length of Voss Strasse and made it a citadel impossible to miss from the air. A temporary brick structure, a shelter or storehouse, rose across from it. The haphazard combination of the stately and haphazard unsettled the eye, and where superb city planning had given way to a shanty town the effect was of an oversized maze. In the evening silence (silence, in Berlin!), all you could hear was the faint noise of the men and vehicles working on the unexploded bomb a block away. The tramlines ran across the street like scars. Bora stopped a moment to compose himself, because he was still too edgy.
Every gate and entrance was manned; there were sentry boxes one after the other, and yet the impression was of a street lined with sepulchres, such as the Romans erected outside their city gates. In front of him, the Air Ministry blocked out the luminous western horizon. Beyond it, the nerve centre in which the offices of various authorities – the SD, the State Police, the Criminal Police, the Gestapo’s counter-espionage division – were stacked on top of each other, forever reporting to the Reich Security Service. Things could be worse: they could have summoned me to that building. From his occasional errands at the Prinz Albrecht Palais, he recalled the grand staircase and the gallery around the handsome inner court. But in the basement, in the rear wing, there was a prison block where the inmates died.
Bora was trying not to brood on it, but everything inside him was tense and alert. He expected – for no other reason than that he’d left early – to be stopped by a patrol at the corner of Voss Strasse, and he was.
They were SS, but this too he’d expected – it was their neighbourhood. Since he was turning east, in the opposite direction, Bora hoped to be able to dodge their questions. If Goerdeler had suggested a certain amount of caution (he’d said Bora should use the service entrance), there had to be a reason for it; it did not necessarily mean that he should lie to the patrol, but —
“Your papers, please.”
I wish I had a mark for every time I had to show them. Bora did as they asked.
“Where are you going, Colonel?”
“Französische Strasse.”
“For what purpose?”
“My duty. I’m expected.”
It might be enough, or it might not. He was actually going beyond it, to Werderscher Markt. They’d probably wonder why he hadn’t stated the exact address or identified the official who’d scheduled such an appointment after hours. The SS patrol held on to the documents, and were on the verge of asking for further explanation. How well Bora knew that puckering of the lips, the officiously slow turning of the pages. They don’t even need a reason to withhold permission for me to proceed. They’re like the shorn police dogs near Michendorf, sniffing me for evidence of wrongdoing and waiting for me to flinch.
; “Expected in which office, Colonel?”
An earth-shattering blast from the direction of Leipziger Platz interrupted the SS men, Bora’s thoughts and everything else. They all instinctively hunched, as if rounding their shoulders would save them from destruction. Panes exploded from high-up windows and came down in a shower of fragments. Chunks of metal and plaster pelted to the ground like hail, and tiles plummeted down, shattering into pieces on the ground or landing on the roofs of the cars; one of the SS men was struck on the helmet, staggered backwards and fell. For a stunned moment, Bora was back in Rome, when another deadly explosion had brought about swift reprisal and more deaths. The bomb just went off … sounds like a medium calibre, but still, more than enough to kill those who were working around it.
“Go, go.” Suddenly no longer interested in him, the other SS man gestured like a traffic policeman for him to move.
Bora did so only after retrieving his papers. Thank God I’m not as consequential as a bomb. He walked away into the controlled chaos that always followed such events; those working late at the Transport Ministry looked out of their shattered windows, called to one another and pointed at the pillar of smoke, invisible from the ground, rising behind the tall buildings. Soon ambulances would come wailing along.
Bora would not have easily cleared the patrol’s scrutiny without the blast. As it was, no one minded him, because in those days an army colonel was not yet a man you went after when a bomb exploded.
Once past the skeletal Kaiserhof, where further collapse caused by the explosion had loosened a cloud of dust the colour of face powder, he was glad to be turning off the avenue. He left behind the wail of sirens, the confusion. During his Berlin Sundays, he’d often taken the underground to Mohrenstrasse, bound for the narrow street that once led to St Hedwig’s, a neighbourhood of venerable churches, none spared by the bombs in May. Towards the east, where the sky was shaded a more intense blue, Werderscher Markt lay in silence.
It was from there that Nebe ran his empire. The Kripo headquarters were across the river, on Alexanderplatz. They said his office had an exit useful for quick getaways which led to an outer court, but Bora didn’t know which one it might be, or if the general’s door was in any way marked. Those of high-rankers with secretive duties often weren’t. What will I say if they ask me why I’m here? Do they know I’m coming?