by Ben Pastor
If one could tolerate a twenty-year-old with a mediocre knowledge of English addressing her father as “mein Daddy” in the American style, in a wife and mother the expression sounded infantile.
“Flying was Peter’s life,” Bora reminded her. “If you don’t understand that, you never really knew him.”
“Ha! Listen to you. Damn you, you never even understood your own wife!”
Why was he talking to her? The childish bickering tired him. Worse, it threatened to turn to anger and disgust in him, at hearing someone sputter whatever came to their mind out of resentment or fear. Bora patiently raised his eyes to the steeple, standing whole in its pretended antiquity while so many venerable buildings lay in ruins.
“Leave it, Duckie. Good luck to you in preparing your next perfect life.”
“What if I am? I will have my husband, and my house, and my five children!”
Bora glanced at her scowling face, and then had to look away. She spoke as if those plans were expensive toys she’d been promised and which she would get one way or another. How could sweetness turn to utter poison? Dikta’s cruelty, when she’d told him that she was leaving, had tasted less acrid. True, it was Dikta who had exerted the most influence on her sister-in-law, teasing her with her talk of sex, provocative underwear and egotism. In a strict household, the two girls might have bonded and eventually become alike, although Margaretha’s spite betrayed an overindulged upbringing all of her own. Distantly related as she was to Bruno Lattmann, Bora was glad not to have asked his friend about her.
“Well, I wish you the best in securing what you want. Only remember that we’re at war.”
“As if I could forget!” She took him by the arm so that he’d look at her, burrowing her dark and burning eyes into him. “Do you know why I wanted to see you?”
Bora slowly freed himself of her hold. “No doubt because you meant to give me a piece of your mind.”
“That, and to tell you that Dikta and I used to read your letters to each other at night, and then get into bed to masturbate. She taught me. Oh, I learned so much, practising what you wrote to her!”
There followed a moment when, in a splintered image in his mind, Bora saw himself striking Duckie with his fist, smashing her teeth, making her fall backwards and leaning on her to thrash her. It was so true to life that he could even smell blood. He saw her prostrate and disfigured, instead of standing triumphantly in front of him.
He really didn’t know what held him back – by now, whatever he had to lose was no more important than what he had already lost. He managed to control himself somehow. And not only to control himself: to take leave, and walk away from the looming church, placing between himself and his sister-in-law the minimum distance needed not to retrace his steps and kill her.
14 July 1944, 11:38 p.m. Written in Grandfather Franz-August’s ruined flat, where I came to have some peace.
I can take anything. I am convinced of it now; I only wish I knew how it is that I do it, so that I could share it with all those in this city, in this nation, who will suffer more than I and need to learn how to take it. The fact is that endurance cannot be taught. Today, perhaps – though I was barely conscious of it – I told myself that the real tragedy was having lost my brother, not listening to his widow vomit venom. I used to worry that Dikta might be a bad influence on her, and so she was. Whether Dikta did it because the General disliked her, or because she simply felt like it, it does not change things. What’s worse, it does not change the physical nostalgia I feel for her. The letters I wrote to her were not meant for anyone else but her. I should be furious, and yet … It is as if I were ill with her, and the only way I knew how not to become even more ill was by not seeing or hearing from my wife.
In the dark library around him, soft cracking sounds rose from the battered shelves. A green, sweet scent from the plants of the nearby Westerwald pushed through the broken window. Bora turned off the torch he had been writing by, and opened the curtains onto the night. This could be the old family home south of Leipzig, with the linden tree in the garden planted by Luther’s wife, Katharina von Bora. This could be a world where people and ties still held fast, where Niemeyer still charmed the crowds, and everything was still possible. A time of wholeness and confidence, when you could safely ignore the storm clouds.
He awoke shortly past one o’clock, uncomfortably curled up in his grandfather’s armchair. If he’d come here to seek peace, this wrecked library and this old piece of furniture were the wrong place. He’d dreamed of Dikta, of that fateful night he’d met her at the army ball, in a gown cut dizzyingly low at the back, unsuited for a 21-year-old but capable of making him lose his head in April ’37.
What did his sister-in-law know about him? Margaretha could pry into all his correspondence with Dikta, and never understand.
Wearily, Bora unbuttoned his tunic, rummaged for the cigarettes, found them, and lit one with his brother’s lighter. He wondered if women (except maybe Remedios) had ever understood him. Then, as now, he didn’t like to be touched before he was excited. He had to reach a restless anxiety first, a need to be aggressive that suffered a woman’s touch as long as it didn’t try to slow him down.
He’d never seen himself as capable of rape, never. Of rough sex, not least if he was thwarted, yes. It’d happened once in Borna, in the summer of ’38, after Spain – after Remedios, the young peasant witch who’d taught him so much about love in the mountains of Aragon. A furlough spent alone with Dikta, in a room where the old linden tree in bloom filled the air with its heady scent.
“Let’s pretend I don’t want it,” Dikta said, laughing.
“No, Dikta. Better not.” He was feeling aggressive (after Spain, after Remedios), and disinclined to test his self-control. Although she tried to charm and insist, he left the bed; he went out onto the balcony, to watch the stars and breathe the oily fragrance from the dark, unruly head of the linden tree.
“All right, love, come back. I’ll be good.” Even as a girlfriend she was a liar. She led him on and played rough and exasperated him; then she pushed him away, kicking, biting and laughing. But even as she laughed, things got out of hand. Afterwards they were both exhausted. Bora had scratches and teeth-marks that the uniform would luckily conceal, and on the delighted Dikta, a medical examination would show that some force had been exerted.
The bruises on her inner thighs anguished him. “Let’s not do it again, ever, Dikta.”
“Why? I enjoyed it. It was fun.” But for the next two days she was too sore to make love, which troubled him even more.
The two nights that followed, Bora would not sleep in her bed. In the library, he sat up reading and drowsing in his grandfather’s armchair. The third night, Dikta walked in. She sat in his lap and kissed his bruises, and he kissed hers.
To this day, it was the episode in his life that shamed him most. Bora could not think about it without blushing. Yet he knew himself well enough to discern that physical aggression was all but beyond him.
After the event, he was sure the military chaplain would not give him absolution, but the savvy priest – a veteran of the Somme – didn’t sound shocked, and took the opportunity to lay on him an extended homily on the bliss of wedded love in the service of procreation. Bora walked away with the feeling that for the Roman Catholic Church it’d be all right even to ravish your girlfriend or your wife, as long as you made her pregnant. So he’d given himself a penance: in lieu of Hail Marys, for a whole month he denied himself lunch, took cold showers and did without alcohol and cigarettes. He never told Dikta about it; she’d have laughed at such nonsense, just as she did at the profusion of flowers and apologies from him.
“Will you stop, Martin? I never enjoyed such a glorious, achy tumble. I’ll marry you for it one of these days, silly.”
And so it had come to pass.
SATURDAY, 15 JULY
By six in the morning, Bora was at the Leipziger Hof. Grimm was due to report at eight, and Bora had every intenti
on to be seen sitting at breakfast by then, in the hall with the sepia Leipzig scene. Ever since waking up in his grandfather’s library, an oppressive awareness that danger was at hand convinced him that Stauffenberg would act today, wherever and in whatever form. It was nothing but a hunch – although hunches were what he often had to thank for his survival. I’ll keep my eyes open, not for omens but for signs that something is happening.
The first news was good: at 6:45 a.m. (Bora was in the lobby, jotting down his list of things to do), an errand boy cycled over with a verbal message from the Adlon head waiter. It seemed that the colonel (meaning Salomon) had requested a cab when he’d hastily checked out of the hotel early on Wednesday morning; the luggage he left behind had been forwarded to the Elizabeth hospital on Lützow Strasse.
The large Protestant hospital, near the Office for Foreign Trade, occupied a city block off Potsdamer Strasse. Because of its religious affiliation and vicinity to the Reserve Army headquarters, Bora had placed it at the bottom of his list the day before. It’d been the final call he had made, and he distinctly remembered hearing that there was no patient there by the name of Salomon. What if the good deaconesses granted asylum to desperate runaways?
He decided to drive to the hospital personally, confident that he would be back in time for Grimm to see him drinking ersatz coffee at his corner table.
Bora’s pretext was that he wanted to return a book to the colonel – in fact, none other than Niemeyer’s Magnus Magnusson: Clairvoyant from the North. He paced the waiting room for twenty minutes (an eternity, given his apprehension and haste), before learning that Salomon had been admitted briefly but was no longer on the premises.
The young foreign doctor, probably a Dutchman judging by his speech, said, “It was a mere case of gastrointestinal trouble. He was dehydrated and we detected an irregular heartbeat, so we kept him under observation overnight. In the morning we needed the bed, and dismissed him.”
Thursday morning. Two days’ advantage that could make all the difference. Bora acted disappointed, while in truth he was indignant. “Do you have an address – or at least a forwarding address, to which I can send the book? I hate to leave town without returning it.”
“Can’t help you there, Colonel.”
“It’s a matter of principle. If I leave the book here with you, is there a way that it could reach the colonel?”
“I don’t see how. He explained that he was going home on medical leave, which is all I can tell you. If you know where the colonel lives, of course, you can send him the book.”
Aside from his long-lost property in Masuria, Bora didn’t know where Salomon might be. Another round of calls might secure a forwarding address, but the odds were ten to one that the colonel was not travelling in its direction.
He returned to the Leipziger Hof in dire need of something that had caffeine in it.
LEIPZIGER HOF, 8:00 A.M.
Bora kept a discreet eye on the hall, half-filled at breakfast time. Grimm would turn up at any moment, and he would have to summon all his energy not to betray any agitation: those trained to detect it underneath a show of self-control are seldom taken in. As often happens when you await someone, his eyes anticipated the bulky image of the policeman, his cheap suit and outrageous tie, automatically discarding newcomers who differed from that description.
Thus it was that he at first ignored the jowly fellow in a dust-coloured trench coat, even if his bulk was comparable to Grimm’s. When a second man followed, however, it became obvious that they were two of the three men he’d met in Kupinsky’s building. Bora raised his defences. The duo searched with their eyes here and there, but it was just pretence, because it was him they wanted, and they had recognized him right away. They did not show their badges to the obliging waiter; one of the two gestured a denial, but no different from that of any visitor who has no time to sit down and eat.
Bora finished the sip of coffee substitute he had in his mouth, and rested the cup, monogrammed with an “L. H.”, on its saucer. Seemingly impassive, he prepared to smile – just as he was prepared, if needed, to point the gun at his own chin and fire.
To his right, a flight lieutenant stood up with faked indifference, but he forgot his sunglasses on the table, and the napkin slipped from his knees and fell under his chair. Bora caught his awkwardness out of the corner of his eye. A moment later, the two were standing in front of him, and he had to find a way to confront them.
“Good morning. May I help you?”
There was no way of knowing whether they’d expected his move. Anything, Bora knew, could have happened since he left Stauffenberg the day before. Thoughts of Niemeyer’s letter, Salomon, the Alsatian head waiter, milled in his head like bits of foil.
The heavier-set of the two, his face grumpy under the rim of his hat, said yes.
“A work-related question? Would you care to sit down?”
“No.”
This is how they do it. He had seen them do it, through the years. They counted on their threatening silence to intimidate those they arrested and interrogated … No, I cannot afford to smile, much less show that I have a hundred reasons to suspect why they are here.
“When did you last see Berthold Kupinsky?”
Well – this he hadn’t expected. Bora wasted no time wondering how the Gestapo had found him here (that was the least of his problems). The important thing was to understand whether they had already nabbed Kupinsky and squeezed him until he told them about the letter. A reverent silence had fallen on the hall. Those still sitting at breakfast were doing so only because leaving hastily might arouse suspicion.
Bora said, “On Thursday morning, while you were busy with his upstairs neighbour, Anton Reich.”
It was so outrageous of him to suggest that he knew what their duty was that day, that there was a fleeting glint of admiration in the eyes of the second agent, who was less massive and perhaps less brutal than his partner.
“And what do you know about Anton Reich?”
“Nothing. He does not appear on the list of murder suspects I received from the chief, SS Group Leader Arthur Nebe.”
They did not ask him about his investigation, which could mean something, or nothing.
“Why then are you familiar with the name?”
Bora was bathed in a cold sweat, but replied with a serenity that surprised even him. “I did not find Kupinsky at home, so I knocked on the door across from his and learned he’d gone out at 6 a.m. After your arrival, I went upstairs and glimpsed the name ‘Anton Reich’ on an envelope in the man’s apartment.”
“And why did you go up to Anton Reich’s?”
“Because I heard someone weeping.”
The answer was disarming. Had Bora known that the Reich’s fate was linked to the arrest on 76 Köpenicker Landstrasse of three enemies of the State about to meet with Stauffenberg, he’d have swallowed his tongue before answering. Fortunately for him, the men – communists who’d been on the run since January – had been seized for reasons unrelated to the plot.
The Gestapo agents did not order Bora to stand, so Bora remained seated, with the coffee substitute cooling in his cup. Whether he likes it or not, Kupinsky has become a Gestapo informant. Why don’t they ask me about him? I cannot show excessive curiosity, nor disregard.
“In case it’s of any help,” he said, “Kupinsky had nothing to add to his earlier deposition.”
It was a colossal untruth. Bora was scared to say it, and the fact that the two did not react meant nothing. They might know everything about Kupinsky, Niemeyer, even about Heldorff and whatever role he played in the larger scheme of things. They might know enough about him to arrest him now. Bora thanked his forethought for making him unlatch the holster before sitting down to breakfast. The only thing that really mattered was not to let them take his gun from him.
Where was Grimm? The electric clock on the wall showed ten minutes after eight. Bora said, raising the cup to his lips, “Forgive me if I finish this, I don’t wa
nt it to go to waste.” Then, if they do not arrest me, I’ll run upstairs to vomit into the sink, because I feel like throwing up my guts.
Just as they had drawn closer to his table, the two did an about-turn and left without saying goodbye. Bora took out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth in the hope of controlling his nausea: he would never make it to his room before vomiting his coffee. He’d taken a first drag when Grimm showed up at the door.
He somehow found the brazenness to observe, “Ah, there you are. I expected you fifteen minutes ago, Inspector.”
“A pit bull after a dog fight” was a good simile for the way Florian Grimm looked when he walked into the dining hall. When Bora asked if he cared for a cup of coffee, he said no, and stood there with scuffed hands and a bloodied sticking plaster on his meaty head. The tie for the day matched the colours of his bruises, with the aggravating circumstance of a bold paisley pattern. He took a hesitant step forward, like a slow-witted schoolboy called to the blackboard. Bora furtively latched his holster and leaned back in his chair. Grimm might reply, “I don’t butt in when there’s Gestapo around,” or he might pretend ignorance. Both reactions would indicate that he means to keep his distance from the Secret Police. But if he says, “I saw you had company,” he’s informing me that he knows very well who I was with, and simply chose to wait outside.
“I saw you had company,” Grimm said.
Bora nodded casually. “Glad to see you’re all in one piece. Are things well with your relatives?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Asked about the air raid, Grimm gruffly summarized. Both families escaped with minor injuries. Although the house was a near loss, relatives in Neukölln were able to shelter his brother, wife and children. He did not enquire about Trost’s dismissal in his absence or about the Olympia, openly parked in front of the hotel. He waited for Bora to rise from the table before handing him a few stapled sheets.