The Knife-Edge Path

by Patrick T. Leahy

  12

  She met him at the station the next day, where they caught the early train to Dresden, due to arrive in time to rush to another track for the 11:15 to Bornichen. Most of the way he sat beside her silently and somber, preoccupied, and she didn’t try to break through his mood to cheer him up. His grief was his. He didn’t need her trying to get in on it.

  She looked at the disheveled top of a woman’s head in the next seat. The rhythmic clackety-clack of the wheels on the tracks ran along her nerves. Her eyelids began to get heavy, then she couldn’t keep them open anymore and they came down like shades on the cold glow of a moon, fitted like a skullcap on some forbidden face.

  She awoke with a start, as if there’d been a jolt. She looked to her left. Kurt wasn’t there. The pneumatic door came open at the end of the car, letting in a racket from the coupling space as the conductor came through, taking tickets. She saw Kurt, then, a short way up the aisle, talking to a large man leaning back against the iron balustrade under the window, smoking a cigarette. He was bundled in a black topcoat, a grey fedora perched on his head. Distinguished-looking, she thought. The conductor came abreast of them, fanning tickets. Geli heard the big man say, “Any chance of a seat farther down?”

  The conductor shook his head. “Nothing but the laps of Colonels and Majors, I’m afraid.”

  “What about the baggage car? I’d gladly stretch out on a mail sack.”

  “I’ve got a party of General staff officers down there, now. Perhaps -” The conductor looked the big man over. One of those looks that contemplates some reward for making an exception. “Why don’t I take you down there, sir? We can’t have all those generals’ laps going to their heads.”

  “Oh! Very kind of you.” The big man turned to Kurt, felt for his hand and, grasping it firmly, held on as he said something earnestly that Geli couldn’t hear.

  The conductor was waiting.

  The big man broke away and Geli shut her eyes. She could feel Kurt brushing past her knees. She opened her eyes. “Oh, Kurt. Sorry, I dozed off. Where are we?”

  He got settled in his seat, not looking at her as he said, “Not far to Dresden, now. We’ll be there in plenty of time to catch our train to Bornichen.” His voice sounded husky.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  “Ah, there was a man was up there,” his hand jumped off his leg to point up toward where he’d been standing, “I saw him trying to light a cigarette. The flint was bad or something. I had some matches, so I went up and offered him a light.”

  “Oh, how good of you. Anybody interesting?”

  He turned to face her. His eyes were blood red. Tired? If she didn’t know any better…

  “Yes, a diplomat from Sweden. Secretary to the Swedish Legation in Berlin. We chatted for a while, he stood there out of courtesy, but it wasn’t hard to see that he was getting nervous. Me in this uniform, you know – provocateurs are everywhere. I couldn’t blame him if he thought I could be one of them.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He thanked me for the light. That was about all.”

  “Mmm. That’s funny. Seems like your uniform alone should not have scared him off, unless -”

  “Unless what?”

  Unless you told him something he didn’t want to hear, she thought. “Oh, I don’t know. Forget it. Did you try to make him know you wouldn’t bite?”

  “No use. I couldn’t have convinced him if I’d tried. I let it go.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, he got his cigarette lit, anyway.”

  “Yes. I gave him the matches.”

  She looked at him again.

  His thin smile was wan.

  “Are you all right, Kurt?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  She wasn’t going to say, “Have you been crying?”

  He would deny it. He’d get angry.

  She could see that he was already heating up.

  “Oh, I just thought, maybe the diabetes had come back on you.”

  No.” He gave her a sharp dissatisfied look, swung his face toward the window.

  She’d opened up the gap again, and didn’t want to wallow in it. She slumped down in the seat and shut her eyes, trying to dive deep beneath the light along her lids to where she could forget. Down there with all the good intentions of this French woman in his life, knowing there was no forgetting, any more than what could have driven him to tears would empty out into the fields that he was watching go by.

  13

  They caught a taxi to the cemetery. A scattering of people stood around the gravesite. Frau Hintz’s sister, Amelia Wulf, and her husband, Oskar, kept glancing furtively at her, whispering, until Kurt presented her as a ‘friend’. Their faces seemed to bloat with all they’d have to ask him later on: how much does your dear wife know about this friend?

  A long white limousine pulled up and a tall, heavy-set man got out. Kurt told her he was Superintendent Dr. Otto Dibelius, head of the Confessional Church, an old friend. He had consented to come all this way from Uppsala to deliver the eulogy.

  A gust of wind swept against the white soutane of the large man as he read the service, stirring the pine branches laid around the open grave.

  Kurt took a stalwart stance beside her, while on the other side of the casket Amelia Wulf wept and snuffed into her handkerchief. Kurt stood there rigidly, stoic and dry-eyed. Then she saw that he was trembling slightly, once or twice there was a shuddering about his head, and she traced back in her mind that almost always austere presence about him, like some dam building pressure whose cracks you couldn’t see. He must have felt her eyes on him, but he kept looking straight ahead across the casket toward the morning sunshine glistening in the glades of the surrounding mountains, flashing in the spectacles of the man who now turned from the grave, closing his Bible on the passages with which he had committed the soul of Leokadia Hintz unto God. Kurt met him halfway as he came over, they clasped each other’s hands.

  All at once Dibelius took on a hurried air. “God bless you, Kurt, I must be off! I have to speak in Württemberg tonight. A lot of people counting on me.”

  Kurt led Dibelius out of earshot where the wind blew into what they were saying and Dibelius listened nervously, making halting movements while Kurt kept talking, lips moving, saying things she couldn’t hear.

  Then the wind changed and she heard, “No, it was no use. The Nuncio threw me out.”

  Dibelius took a fretful stance in the white sand. His voice carried on another lull in the wind, “… not easy, Kurt. The Bishop of Württemberg sent a letter to Hitler himself in favor of the privileged non-Aryans.”

  Kurt raised his voice as he stepped closer to the big man. “Mere courage, Otto. Try to pretend for just a moment that Frau Hintz was a Jew! Would you have found some excuse to get out of coming all this way to bury her?”

  Dibelius lifted his chin haughtily. “… Wurm’s protests get repeated abroad, he’ll be a dead man. You want that for me, too? Now I must go, Kurt. Come see me in Berlin!” The large imposing man wheeled and quickly strode across the grass, kicking his soutane, toward his waiting car.

  A voice from the shadow of a large sheltering pine called out, “Will you come back to the house with us, Kurt?” It was Amelia Wulf, dogged by her husband, coming toward them.

  “Perhaps not right away,” Kurt said.

  By then Amelia Wulf was reaching her arms around him. She pulled him close. “God be with you, Kurt. I know you loved my sister dearly.”

  Oskar Wulf put on his hat, emerging into the sun from under a pine bough. “We’ll have refreshments at the house. Do come and eat with us. We’re counting on you. Ham and black bread, fresh baked.”

  “We’ll try,” Kurt said.

  The Wulfs both smiled uneasily, eyes darting on and off the woman they would have to save for gossip at a later date, or at the wake.

  Kurt took her hand, then, and they walked past the leaning headstones and the trees, and she let something of her feeling for him out i
nto the sun where it could find him. He looked so handsome, the way he squinted to adjust his eyes to the light.

  They walked clear to the edge of a wooded hillside, sat on a wooden bench and, looking back the way they’d come, she saw the Wulfs had gone. She knew Kurt couldn’t leave all his sadness back at the grave, but here the dead had not so much to do with them, and she had him to herself. Something was pent up in him.

  She took a chance and said, “I missed you.”

  He gave her a quizzical look as if she’d spoken out of turn.

  She went on, “Oh, I know I shouldn’t have worried, but I was afraid you might not come back from Finland. Silly of me, I suppose. Still, I hear those Heinkels make good targets.”

  He turned away moodily. “It’s not over, yet.”

  “You have to go back?”

  “No. My superiors want to see me first thing in the morning.”

  That he would tell her this at all moved her, unexpectedly, closer to him, where the road led to some abyss that smelled dangerously of the Nile, and the pomade on the empty pillow next to hers.

  “Did something happen? I mean, did anything go wrong?”

  He searched her face, giving her a look that made her feel uneasy. “I’ll be told tomorrow morning if they think it did.”

  In her mind the two Dutchmen, skittish about her presence, left the room as if it wasn’t her that made them go. She knew it was. They’d finish what they had to say about Helsinki at St. Anne’s.

  Kurt was watching her. He looked away, sniffed in a breath and looked out across the tranquil land of the dead. At last he said with a sigh, “The Wulfs will be expecting us. I suppose we should put in an appearance. Of course they’ll want to put me up for the night.”

  “And I’ll just find my way back to a train.”

  He looked at her and she could see he would be hard put to it to beg off the Wulfs’s invitation.

  She didn’t feel like being polite, or hear what she saw brewing in his eyes, and be the poor little girl left out. She said decisively, “Or else that leaves me with some other place to stay the night. Know of any cheap little inns around here?”

  He stared at her. “The Wulfs won’t miss me that much if I don’t show up.”

  “Oh, they’ll miss you, all right. Long enough for them to wonder how I’ve come into the picture. Where has he been hiding that one, they’ll wonder.”

  “I doubt it. They’ve never met my wife.”

  She glanced at him, trying to see how near or far his wife was in his eyes.

  He looked away from her to say, “What do you suppose she’d make of my being here with you?”

  “I won’t be telling her,” he said.

  She turned a scathing look on him. “I could catch the late train back tonight.”

  “Or we’ll ask around about that cheap little inn,” he said with a kind of wanton smile.

  She took him up on that. “There’s no other kind as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

  He was silent for a moment, then, squinting a little as he blinked out at the shadows slanting from the headstones, pines and alders in the waning light. At last he said, “You know they put me up at the Savoy in Helsinki?”

  She raised her face to him, feeling a strange fresh breeze flow in across her heart. “You must be pretty tired of hotels,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t want to pay good money for another long, hard seat on a train. Not tonight.”

  She wasn’t sure it was him, talking, or some nonesuch voice in a crazy reverie she’d once put words to. She felt better now, being with him. That was all she knew. “So you’re not sending me back?”

  “Let’s sit here a while, then take a walk.”

  Something told her not to ask where to, and they sat there together, as if they were in love, and it was strange to wonder if they were. If there was something to get out of him, tonight was the night.

  They came upon an inn not far from the cemetery, a quaint two-story stucco with leaded windows in the shade of several birches and one soaring, stately pine.

  “That’s it,” he said, as if he’d known the way by heart.

  She didn’t act surprised, and suddenly it felt good to be away from the city, far from the bombing. Far from the bonds she’d slipped as if she’d never have to go back, and she was here only because he wanted her to be.

  A stone walk led through a rose garden to the front door. They registered on the unspoken appearance of being man and wife, and Kurt asked for a bottle of wine to be brought up.

  The room smelled of fresh roses in a fluted glass vase on one night-table.

  They didn’t wait long before the concierge knocked lightly and came in with a Château Boyd-Cantenac, 1937, two glasses and a corkscrew, a plate of bread and cheese.

  Kurt used the corkscrew on the wine, poured into the glasses on the table. She picked up hers and, strolling over toward the window, parted the curtain and stood there looking down at the rose petals scattered like the remains of a wedding in the dirt. She turned to see Kurt catching sight of a radio under the unlit lamp on the other night table.

  “Look at this.” He reached for the knob.

  “It looks so old,” she said, “I’ll bet it doesn’t work.”

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  He twisted the knob. Static came in, airwaves squealed as he fiddled with the dial. Faint strains of music came through what sounded like the crackling of a distant storm. He turned the knob some more until a voice broke in, speaking in French: ‘The old colonial city has unfurled her tricolors and plunged into festivity. Her jubilant population, doubled by refugees from the fighting and a horde of exultant, victorious allied soldiers who at last were out of the harsh North African deserts and mountains, is giving itself over to wine, song and dance. Young women smother marching British and Free French troops with kisses, and shower the victors’ tanks and trucks with roses, lilacs and poppies. The Hotel Majestic, where Axis officers resided only two days ago, now accommodates Allied officers. At the same moment this revelry is going on in North Africa, we have received reports of rioting in Berlin. Families of Panzer Army Afrika soldiers have taken to the streets of the German capital after being denied news of their men in Tunisia. In a further report from a suburb of Tunis, we hear of German soldiers willingly walking into prison compounds. A German infantry band was said to be serenading arriving captives with strains of Viennese Lieder.’

  In the background you could hear the trumpets, trombones and a tuba playing the Lieder.

  Kurt switched the sound off, came back over to the sofa where she sat, holding her glass. “Imagine that,” he said.

  “Yes, all those captured soldiers. What a shame,” she said.

  “For them the war is over.”

  “Do you think the end is near, Kurt? Will there ever be an end?”

  He raised his glass and took a long, deep drink. There was a kind of reckless thickness in his voice. “Frau Hintz used to say she couldn’t wait see every last one of Hitler’s gang of thugs paraded in front of the old Chancellery in chains.”

  “Taking a big chance saying that, wasn’t she?”

  He looked at her, clutching his empty glass. “She always spoke her mind, no matter what I thought.”

  “Well then, shall we risk drinking to victory in Tunis for Frau Hintz?” She held up her glass.

  He looked into the emptiness of his. “Wait a minute.” He wheeled toward the table, grabbed the bottle and filled up his glass.

  As he was coming back she patted the cushion next to her thigh. “Come sit beside me, Kurt. You’re too far away.”

  He sank into the cushion, raised his glass and bellowed, “Frau Hintz!”

  They both drank and then he blinked at their reflection in the window, looking strangely dazed and disoriented.

  She laid her hand on his. “I hardly ever see you smile, Kurt. Why don’t you ever smile?”

  He raked his fingers across his forehead, examining his half-empty glass. “I�
�m not used to this. I think I’m getting tight.”

  She threw her head back with a breathy laugh. “So what? You deserve it. You know you’re such an easy man to like, but - no, I take that back. I was going to use that old cliché, hard to love, but that’s not true. Not true at all.”

  He didn’t answer. He was looking at her now as if he couldn’t place her. As if he wasn’t seeing her at all. The wine was going to her head already, too, and she wanted him to lean on her, and want her more than Gunther ever had before he started hating her.

  “What’s the matter, Kurt?”

  He kept on looking at her as if he hadn’t heard. “I shouldn’t have brought you here, Simone. Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for -? Oh, I see. Why me when it could be your wife?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Then what? You think it’ll get around? Some French lady who could be a partisan or something, showing up at a funeral with you?”

  The glass jerked in his hand, he raised it to his lips and drained it. “You’re being seen with me. I hadn’t thought it out.”

  She pretended not to remember what the wind had let her overhear.

  “Kurt, what troubles you so much about tomorrow? Ever since you came back from Helsinki -”

  His eyes flicked onto her and stuck. “I’ll take care of that.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  He shrugged. A cloudy look came into his wandering eyes. “Remember this. If you lose track of me, don’t try to find me.”

  “Stop it, now. If Frau Hintz could hear you.”

  “You don’t know who I am, Simone,” he said.

  There was something in his voice that made her press her hand down onto his. She held on tight. “I couldn’t love you any better if I did,” she said, watching his face to see if his belief could tell her that she meant it.

  He looked down at her hand as if to keep from falling. “I’ve seen things for which we were once told, don’t talk about it if you want to go on living. One day they’ll get around to me.”

  Shock swung at her heart. She put her fingers on his lips. “Then be quiet. I don’t know. They can’t get anything out of me that I don’t know.”