The Night of Shooting Stars

by Ben Pastor

  “I’m here to see you, if you have a moment.”

  At any other time but wartime, the request would seem unusual, even overfamiliar. Could the interval they’d spent together smoking on the top step during the air raid have changed the rules of etiquette for them? Namura frowned, but after a second grunted the short assent so typical of his culture. He preceded Bora up the flight of stairs and to his door.

  The room, so similar to the one Bora had occupied that it could have been the same one, was impeccable. No personal items in disarray, or even in view. The sole exception was a large, framed wedding picture on the bed, propped against the pillow. Even without stepping closer, Bora recognized Namura sitting with his knees far apart and the beribboned hilt of an elaborate ceremonial sword in his hands, and his bride standing at his side in a traditional costume. He looked away with embarrassment, being all too familiar with the fetishes of a man in love. Until a month ago, he’d carried Dikta’s photographs with him. Only after disposing of them had he used his teeth to remove the wedding band from the ring finger of his right hand.

  “Dôso.” With a small gesture, Namura invited him to sit down. However, Bora declined, explaining that he had come on a private and urgent matter. Not knowing whether there were any listening devices in the room, he asked, with a bow of his head, for permission to open the window. Being a military attaché, Namura immediately understood. He threw the window open himself, and waited for his German colleague to join him there.

  “Namura-Chusa, I have a favour to ask you, as a brother officer,” Bora began. His face was so serious that Namura once more saw through him.

  “And as a man who, too, wishes to die?”

  “Yes.”

  Before meeting Stauffenberg, Bora had placed Niemeyer’s letter, in its envelope addressed to E. D., inside a larger, unsealed Manila envelope, which he now handed to the Japanese officer. Without looking at the contents, Namura sealed it, walked to the desk against which he’d rested his briefcase upon entering the room, and added the envelope to his papers. There was no need for any comment. Namura closed the window.

  “You told me the other day that your honourable grandfather served as consul in Japan,” he said. “Was his stay a fruitful one?”

  “It was a fruitful one, Namura-Chusa.”

  “Let us speak of it sometime.”

  Meanwhile, Bora had scribbled on a page of his notebook, How long can you keep the envelope?

  In perfect western longhand, Namura wrote below it, I will occupy this room till the end of the month.

  *

  Bora walked into the Leipziger Hof at ten to six, with every intention of getting in touch with Arthur Nebe by telephone at the appointed time. Handing him the room key, the concierge informed him that a lady had once more called and asked for him.

  “She would not leave her name, Lieutenant Colonel, no. I took the liberty of suggesting that she try again after nine in the evening.”

  Bora looked at the hand-coloured photo of the Underground Fair Hall in Leipzig hanging on the pineapple-strewn wall behind the man. “You did the right thing. Did she ask for my room by number, or …?”

  “No, sir. Naturally, I would not divulge the number of your room to an outside caller, especially one who does not give her name.”

  So, whoever she is, she knows I’m billeted here, but no more than that. He had to make sure that it wasn’t Emmy Pletsch. “A Silesian accent, would you say?”

  “Oh, no. No accent to speak of, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say Rhineland or thereabouts.” Not Ida Rüdiger either, then, Bora’s second-best bet. The nonplussed expression on his face encouraged the concierge to venture further hypotheses. “If the lieutenant colonel will allow me – the caller sounds somewhat impatient.”

  “Not so impatient that she would leave a name by which I could identify her,” Bora answered drily. “Should she phone again while I’m out, tell her from me that I will not take anonymous calls. If she’s this reluctant to give her name, I must at least have a number where I may reach her.”

  “It will be done.”

  At six o’clock, Arthur Nebe’s private phone number rang on and on. If he hadn’t left for the day, he was away from his office. At the Kripo headquarters’ central exchange, they told Bora that the chief would definitely be in early on the following day.

  “The chief has your number. Should the chief choose to return your call, he will do so. But it isn’t generally done.”

  Bora replaced the receiver in its cradle. Why was he trying to contact Nebe, anyway? He had no valuable update to report. One reason was to gather information on Gustav Kugler’s past as an enforcer in Berlin. But after all, Grimm would be back in the morning, and if he was as willing to gossip about his former colleague as he’d been in the case of the S-Bahn murderer, he would satisfy his questions.

  The dark heart of the matter was Niemeyer’s letter. Safe for the moment in the hands of his Japanese colleague, after his meeting with Stauffenberg Bora could no longer mistake it for the ravings of a frightened and vengeful man. Blaming the conspirators, or Heldorff, or all of them, Niemeyer provided culprits and a solution Bora was not ready to trust. Much less could he turn it over to the chief without unleashing a witch-hunt in the military.

  Thank God his cold-bloodedness was back. On his way out of the Adlon, he’d enrolled (and tipped) the Alsatian head waiter, asking him to discover if anyone in the hotel – chambermaid, valet, porter – knew where Salomon might have moved to. The old man promised to find out and send word either way.

  There wasn’t much Bora could do between now and nine o’clock, when the mysterious woman might or might not seek him a third time. That afternoon, before leaving Die Dame, he had drained a bottle of Apollinaris water, which had cost him an outrageous sum. Astride her white bullock, Europa had seemed to smirk at him from the painting, as if to say You are a perfect fool for letting Emmy go.

  The windows in the room faced west, so the heat of day was coming through them. Closing them did not appreciably improve things; Bora compromised by leaving them open but drawing the blackout curtains across them. He didn’t need to look out to be reminded that the trains to Paris, and via Leipzig to Vienna, were less than a mile away, beyond Potsdamer Strasse. Paris was still in German hands, presumably much as he’d last seen it four years earlier, when he’d been under orders to trail that wayward patriot, Ernst Jünger, and to oversee the execution of a German deserter in the beautiful “City That Does Not Look at You” … No point deluding oneself; the Americans would reach Paris before long. As for Leipzig and Vienna, well, he didn’t want to think about their prospect of survival, as cities of the Reich in the Red Army’s path. Just like Berlin.

  Bora reclined on the bed with his boots on; the only concession to form was that he laid a newspaper on the pale yellow counterpane before resting his feet on it. If he wanted to function in the next hours, he had to get Stauffenberg’s words out of his mind. And Emmy too, whom he’d made talk about herself while he himself had told her so little.

  Propping the pillow behind his head, he tried to relax his shoulders. He’d always been laconic. It was a fact. Not because he had nothing to say, but because he was cautious, and had been trained not to trust too readily. But, Christ, he did it in order to protect others – if it came to that – not himself. Jünger, his off-and-on correspondent since their French days, did not think twice before sending him troubling letters. They were hand-delivered and sealed, yet Bora found such a cavalier disregard of caution inappropriate. Ernst Jünger provocatively writing about the need for a “larval life” was not all that different from Oster, let alone Claus von Stauffenberg. These men behave like officers of the old imperial army, a privileged class that was allowed a certain amount of rebelliousness because it belonged to the same milieu as its sovereign. This isn’t the way you prepare a coup. We are all brother officers, but even among brothers there can be betrayal, or a weak link that breaks under threat, or torture. As in physi
cs, the forces of resistance ought to arise from attrition, cohesion, weight and acceleration … How many of them can the conspirators claim? If I ferret out Salomon, I may have to kill him.

  *

  He woke up after eight thirty, and the sight of Magnus Magnusson: Clairvoyant from the North in his lap told him that he’d fallen asleep while reading it. It was not like him to nap during the day, so it must have been the recitation of Niemeyer’s fictitious Norse lineage that did it. Sunlight still filtered through a gap in the curtains, hanging limp in the absence of any breeze. Bora went into the bathroom to wash himself. As always in the past ten months, there was that first moment of surprise at the fact that he could no longer, strictly speaking, wash his hands, which then became acceptance. The face in the mirror looked back at him, stern and boyish; there was a certain resemblance to Stauffenberg, the younger Stauffenberg of nine years earlier. In the stifling room overlooking the bridge, he’d felt (and feared that he seemed) a lad compared to him. Commanders occasionally judged him to be younger than his thirty years, which he minded a little. He’d known suffering, for God’s sake. Perhaps not as much as Claus von Stauffenberg (or Willy Osterloh), but he’d known suffering – and how! He quickly shaved for the evening, and avoided catching his eye in the reflective surface.

  9:02 P.M.

  “Lieutenant Colonel, a telephone call for the Lieutenant Colonel.” The waiter’s message came barely above an obliging whisper, but had the power of startling Bora. He had to control himself not to rush from his chair (in the dining hall there were no phones that could be brought directly to the table, like in other Berlin hotels) to one of the private phone booths off the lobby.

  “Martin, this is your sister-in-law.”

  Without those words, he might or might not have recognized Margaretha’s voice, as he hadn’t seen her much.

  “Duckie!” he said. “Is everything all right? Where are you?”

  “I’m in town.”

  The concierge was right, she sounded impatient, and not overly friendly. Bora thought of Nina’s words about her having become embittered after Peter’s death in Russia.

  “Is everything all right?” he repeated.

  “I want to see you.”

  “I’d like to see you too, it’s been months.”

  She didn’t reply. It’d actually been close to two years. Bora had last been in Germany on furlough early in September 1942. Her stand-offish tone, the fact that she hadn’t identified herself to him by name – much less her nickname – and now her silence, made him anticipate some sort of bad news.

  “Are our families all right?” he urged her. “Your little girl?”

  “Yes, all fine. I want to see you.”

  “Well, if you wish I can leave now and come to you, Duckie. Where are you staying in Berlin?”

  “Let’s meet in front of St Matthew’s, on Matthäikirchplatz, in half an hour.” Margaretha was not obliged to tell him where she was staying, but her reticence gave him pause. Bora tried to visualize the map of Berlin: no hotel of consequence, that is, of the type an industrialist’s daughter would choose even in wartime, looked out onto the church square. She was Catholic, but the church was a Protestant one. She may be a guest of relatives, or family friends … Then he remembered that the Air Force Ordnance Inspectorate was there; hadn’t Nina said that Duckie was seeing one of Peter’s colleagues, now assigned to a desk at headquarters?

  The distance from the Leipziger Hof was entirely manageable on foot. Bora left word for them to leave the table set for him (he was hungry), and started out for the quarter south of the Tiergarten, near the Bendlerstrasse and the place where he’d met Stauffenberg only hours earlier.

  MATTHÄIKIRCHPLATZ, 9:23 P.M.

  The very last shadows were long and crisp, of a muted lilac tinge. The greenness of the vast park north-east of the zoo mellowed the sweltering heat of the fading day. A scent of blooming shrubs – and of trees splintered by debris during air raids – rode the ghost of a breeze. If one closed one’s eyes, Berlin was as Berlin had ever been. Bora turned away from the canal at the corner of Tirpitzufer, where the water ran silently and slowly. So much in the last few days had happened within walking distance from here: the Potsdam and Anhalt stations, where he’d gone with Grimm and the policeman to recover Glantz’s rifle; Leipziger Strasse, where a bomb had gone off shortly after his arrival; the Adlon was fifteen minutes away, and so were the Japanese embassy and Ida Rüdiger’s beauty parlour.

  Bora was apprehensive about meeting his brother’s widow; on the phone, she had spoken to him as to a stranger, but that could be because he and Dikta had parted ways. He didn’t know whether to hope or not hope that she might be carrying a message from his ex-wife. His agitation grew so much that he placed a lid of self-control on it.

  The striped, pseudo-Gothic church of St Matthew’s cast a vast shadow. With its pointed steeple, in the low sun it gave the impression of a tall creature, halfway between a red-and-ochre llama and a giraffe kneeling by a blue pond.

  Few people were around at this hour, strollers returning from the park mostly. If Bora remembered correctly, his uncle’s colleague Dr Bonhoeffer, who’d attended the funeral, had a son who was or had been an ordained minister of this parish. As he proceeded into the square, he caught sight of the young woman standing there alone, dwarfed by the building behind her.

  At first he hesitated, because Margaretha was unrecognizable. Bora recalled her as she was on the day of her wedding to Peter, a credulous and tender twenty-year-old, as if she hadn’t yet grown up. Traditional, without ideas of her own, madly in love. She was close to twenty-four now; the endearing chubbiness of the earlier years was gone. And there was a meanness in her eyes.

  The first thing Bora noticed was that the wedding band and Nina’s ring, the heirloom once denied to Dikta, were gone from her right hand. More than a sign of freedom, that naked hand (the left one wore a summer glove, and held the other glove like a scrap of lace) seemed to him a rebellion against the world she had known.

  They greeted each other civilly, without seeking an embrace, and she explained how she had traced him through Bruno Lattmann, to whom she was distantly related. Bora readied himself for some sort of grievance, but was taken aback by the way she embarked at once on a tirade which she must have been thinking about right up to the point she saw him arrive. The argument was about Peter, of course.

  Keeping at arm’s length from him, she at once berated Bora for her loss – as if, instead of keeping mum on the phone about her reason for wanting to meet him, she’d indicated to him that she would tell him exactly this. Bora felt guilty as it was, because at the start of the war with Russia he’d enthusiastically shared with his brother every success they’d met on the way east.

  He decided to let Duckie have her say. After speaking to his mother, he had expected a reproach from her, and unless her recriminations became downright offensive, he was ready to sympathize. Apologies, on the other hand, were impossible and futile.

  “… He loved me but he adored you,” she raged on, as if her jealousy, delayed and then finalized by death, were too strong to remain unspoken or be mollified. “Don’t deny it. His eyes lit up whenever he spoke of you. It was ‘Martin, Martin, Martin’ all the time, as if he’d made himself a pattern of you to follow. When you went missing in Stalingrad, he was so crushed that he nearly forgot that I was pregnant and he should take care of me and think of me. We were supposed to be happy, buy a house and have five children, and be happy!” She spoke with venom in her voice, as if Bora had wilfully kept that future from happening, or didn’t care at all. Yet he’d written her a long letter after Peter’s accident, and anyone with an ounce of sensitivity would have read in it how shattering the bereavement was for the surviving brother.

  He let her speak without interrupting her, shifting his gaze between her angry figure and the placid church beyond. So far, she’d only spoken about herself. He asked, somewhat provocatively, “Did you know that Nina was in town la
st Sunday?”

  “For the funeral? Yes. I’m not attending funerals anymore.” Right, and she wasn’t wearing mourning clothes. She’d donned a bright, flowery silk dress and a straw hat with a heart-shaped brim, fashionable but unsuitable for a wartime city. “Speaking of which,” she said, “I want Peter’s lighter. Give it to me.”

  It was the only keepsake Bora had of his brother. “I lost it,” he lied.

  “That’s not true. Peter’s father let you have it, so give it to me.”

  “I lost it in September, when I was wounded.”

  “It’s mine!”

  “Well, you can’t have it, it’s gone.”

  The excuse was plausible, and – given their strained relations – Margaretha would not ask his mother about it.

  Bora had never envied Peter for having a wife of whom his parents approved. Now that he saw how mistaken that approval was, his stepfather’s dislike for Dikta seemed tragic. Still, he could not bring himself to censure anyone today, not even this warped incarnation of a former sweetheart.

  “When did you last see Nina and the General?”

  “It’s none of your business. You were never home. Peter volunteered for Russia, not once but twice, because you did. He could have fought on a different front, if it weren’t for you.”

  “He could have died on a different front, Duckie.”

  The only thing that remained of the girl he’d once known were her dimples. Yet now they showed because she pursed her lips in a stiff grimace, not in a smile. She aggressively jutted out her chin.

  “Only if you fought on that other front. If it weren’t for you, he’d have listened to me and to my daddy and transferred to the High Command.” (Bora cringed at the thought of such family manoeuvres. Not Peter, he thought.) “My daddy and I would have made him see sense.” She actually stomped her foot like a spoiled child, and her heel clacked on the pavement. “Don’t you see? You ruined everything for me. Our life was perfect, and you ruined it!”