“Thank you, Ben. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and her voice could scarcely make itself understood above the noise of her weeping typhoon, and I thought, Jesus God, what is she going to do when she gets to the true end of all this?
I didn’t make the tea. We both went downstairs, and in slow German she asked the robots for tea and toast—and they made perfect, thick-ish slabs of cream-colored, bready toast, dense with melting butter.
Keeping my voice light, I said, “How does that needle work?”
“Blessed if I know,” she said, “but it’s always worked for me.”
“Never wrong?”
She said, “Sometimes you get a false start. Remember that murder case I told you about at home? Well, at first they found only a coat. And when they took the coat away and I did the pendulum again—the body was in a completely different place.”
I dropped a piece of toast—naturally it fell on the buttered side—and said, “You mean it found the missing person’s coat before it found the actual person?”
She said, “It does that sometimes, but it always comes out right.”
Heart in mouth, I said, “Shouldn’t you go on looking?”
And she said with a laugh, “You don’t know Charles. There’s no chance he’d ever lose a coat.”
98
Next morning the girl arrived, and I intercepted her.
“Are you trying to get us back to Ireland?”
“That is a fact.” And she smiled.
“She”—meaning Kate—“won’t see the joke.”
“We’re hiding you here until we get a boat out of Bremerhaven. The way you came in. There’s no place else to go. Getting you to the American lines would be too difficult.”
I said, “She’s talking about a place named Saint-Vith.”
“Why does she want to go to Saint-Vith?”
I said, “Did you ever hear of a thing called a pendulum? For finding people?”
She said, “My grandmother did it.”
“But isn’t it mere witchcraft? Or old wives’ tales? I mean, there’s no rationale in it.”
“I believe in the possible,” she said. “I’m from Belgium.”
“Come on. How can you find somebody by rubbing a needle through a possession of theirs, and then holding the needle over a map? Ridiculous.”
“Why do the police use it? They don’t believe in magic, would you say?”
I said, “It makes no sense. On any level.”
The girl cut in, with a measure of sarcasm. “I can tell that you don’t want to find him alive, do you?”
I said, “She will ask me now every hour of every day—she’ll get up in the middle of the night and knock on my door to ask me—when can we go?”
And every hour of the past two days, Kate had indeed asked, referred to it, made some allusion, pleaded, begged, entreated—find all the synonyms in the English language for the word demand, then find all the synonyms for the word supplication.
Now she trotted out to the steps on which we stood.
“How far are we from Saint-Vith? Has Ben told you the good news? When can we go?”
The girl led her away from me, to the far edge of the terrace, where they stood and talked, animated like negotiators. I hoped that she was telling Kate of the plans to take us back to Bremerhaven. But it has been one of the trials of my life that I so often confuse what I hope for with what I should expect; too much of what I forecast comes from wishful thinking, and I didn’t anticipate that the Belgian girl would support Kate’s belief in the pendulum.
Looking back on it now, how could I have won? Any woman, no matter how pragmatic, would always have sympathy with another woman searching the battlefields for an adored husband.
Next morning we climbed into another van, this time heavy with police insignia, and driven by a man with recklessly thick glasses. In equally dense French he told Miss Begley that he would take us to the Belgian border not far from Saint-Vith. He lectured us all the way, sour and obscene, ridiculing us for getting into an area so near the war, and now he was going to pitch us farther in and he didn’t care what happened to us.
To Kate, he made appalling remarks, too crude to repeat, and largely to do with having shared the bed of an American officer. I thought, when he finally let us out of the car, that he might kick us into Belgium. To the guard on the German side of the border he described us as “a couple of Irish fools, whose country is so small and backward they don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world.”
Of course, as I discovered, both the driver and the border guard had been part of the Belgian girl’s strategy. When I went back after the war, I met them both—and I might as well reveal that I went back as much to apologize to the villagers, whose neighbors had been shot because of us, as to pick up the story of Charles Miller, which still had so many baffling parts.
“What did you think of us that morning?” I said to the man with the thick glasses. He had prospered after the war, owning a chain of accountancy offices and a coat with a fur collar.
He said, “I told you that day: a pair of idiots. I thought she was leading you around by the nose—or some other organ.”
99
We walked into Belgium, Kate Begley and I, into war-torn Belgium, a country ripped open and bleeding, and the blood was all flowing in our direction, only we didn’t know it yet. Neither did I know that I was entering the worst period of my life—although I did suspect and fear so. No matter what had gone before, nothing could compare to what lay ahead.
By now, my resolve to keep a journal had failed, and I felt disinclined to write at all. When I simply had to keep a record—and it can be a compulsion—I did my best, but it never lasted for long.
Miss Begley didn’t do so well either, probably because I had fallen back in my resolve; or perhaps on account of the severe tension she must have been feeling. Yet she made one entry, a passage of her journal that I later found so valuable. She wrote it the morning after the pendulum had danced over the village of Saint-Vith and the town of Liège.
I knew it! Charles is alive. Thank you, God! Alive! He is in Belgium, near the village of St.-Vith. My pendulum told me, and that is where we shall go next. I don’t know whether I can get him to come back into Germany with me, and from there we’ll go home to Ireland, or perhaps get to Paris.
If I had read that journal entry while still in Europe in December 1944, I think that I’d have found a doctor and had Kate Begley taken into some sort of care in order to get her back to Ireland. Those can’t have been the thoughts or reactions of a sane woman. And yet, other than some tics and twitches, I hadn’t seen any serious hints of derangement—unless that intense focus of hers amounted to some kind of instability. In fact, with the women of the village in Germany, she seemed very like the girl I’d seen at Lamb’s Head.
So what can she have been thinking? Did she know anything concrete of her husband’s style of soldiering? What had he told her? That he got behind enemy lines undercover, and hid all day? And at night, like some werewolf, he came out and slit the necks of German officers?
That’s what I assumed he did, and that’s what had been hinted to me—Killer Miller. Even if she hadn’t known, how did she assume—and she knew that we were going behind German lines—how did she assume that he could just walk away from the war, as though he were a member of some wandering troupe of performers?
My guess is that it belonged in the same kind of thinking that she developed when she was four years old. By refusing to accept that her parents had drowned, she’d built and maintained a kind of shield around herself. Otherwise courageous, she had granted herself one area of life in which she never had to face reality.
100
Our first challenge arrived within minutes. Once the border point disappeared behind us, not a soul did we see. We walked along a country road, and a steep hill rose ahead. Loose trees stood like soldiers across the heights. We climbed to the hilltop and saw a long farmland valley below. A sma
ll sign pointing left said, SCHONBERG—8KM. Since the previous day, my heart had begun to pound so loud that I could hear it.
Kate scrutinized a piece of paper and hummed a tune. She had written out, she told me, the name of every town and village that we were likely to see, and she began to recite them: “Bütgenbach, Stavelot, Büllingen—”
A roaring sound overwhelmed her voice. Above the treetops, with the suddenness of panic, came an aircraft. It aimed itself down at us. What could the pilot see? Two small people on a country road. Each carried a not very large valise. They looked hesitant.
He banked, turned, and came back. From the side this time, and lower, he had plenty of room to get down near us. The road amounted to no more than a ribbon in this huge furrow of the forest. Trees didn’t begin for hundreds of yards on either side. A squadron of planes could have flown down this corridor, wingtip to wingtip.
We could smell the fuel he came so low. A small, fast plane, black cross on the wings. He went right over our heads. Peeled off up into the sky. How can an engine snarl and whine at the same time? I had never seen anything move that fast.
Back he came, straight at us. I saw him, face masked with goggles. He was so low that we ducked. Miss Begley’s hair flew up and back. She looked at me, said nothing. I didn’t look behind. She said, “He’s gone.”
Once again, she was mistaken. I heard him whine and snarl in a circle. Around the trees he went, over the hilltop and down the valley, a long way down the valley. And then he climbed, high, high, into the clear frosty sky—and turned.
I watched him. Down he came. His steep trajectory aimed him straight at us. And then I saw the puffs. Little fast-rising pouts of dust, a chain of them on the road. A line of white puffs was racing up the hill toward us.
Déjà vu. Of course we knew what they were. For once, Kate did the right thing—she flung her arms out like a crucifix and threw her head back. Her entire posture cried, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” So did her voice. She didn’t scream the words, she didn’t shriek them, she called them out.
“Shoot me,” she cried a third time.
The little road explosions veered away because the pilot did. A few yards into the no-man’s-land open roadside the machine-gun stuttering stopped. Miss Begley stood there in open air, head back, arms out, lepidopterized like a pinned butterfly.
And once more the pilot flew away down the valley and once more he came back, only this time his trajectory was not angled down, it was level and would take him a hundred feet above our heads, and as we looked up, he waggled his wings three or four times, and, as jaunty as a schoolboy, he flew away across the hills to his Fatherland.
“Some joke,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Ben, don’t you understand? We’re under some kind of protection. And I know who’s providing it.” Her face shone with the zeal of an evangelist.
“We must walk on,” I said.
I see it so often in my mind—that road, that wide woodland corridor. The climb had required all our breath; the descent was a slow and pleasant relief. Near the bottom of that long hill, a village began to slope up toward us. The houses had been built by somebody who painted Christmas cards. We walked in, along the only street we could see—but there was an intersection.
Not a soul appeared as we walked past the first few doors. We reached a small bar and café on the corner of the junction. Neither of us saw the vehicles down the side street—nobody can see around corners.
“Tea or coffee?” I joked, and Kate smiled. Not a trace of nerves or reaction did she show to the fighter plane experience; she might have been going to visit an aunt. In fact I thought of Little Red Riding Hood and the woods, and that brought back thoughts of wolves, and as we walked into the café, there they stood, the wolves, all gray coats and danger.
Kate might have thought that they smiled when they saw her; I knew better—they were baring their fangs. In a pack, too—six of them, and their shiny black paws, and their fierce eyes, and the end of my life, as I thought.
From that moment on, in that little Belgian café, my view of the word neutral, and the emotional and intellectual condition it describes, began to change. How could it not? In aura, in attitude, in the capacity to strike terror into human hearts, I was confronted by a hunting pack of wolves—six officers of the Waffen SS, the worst of the worst, who had come for a briefing in the village. We never got to Saint-Vith.
101
When, long after the war, I went back on that journey I’ve mentioned, to trace what had happened to us, to attempt a clearer recollection in tranquillity, I found my expectations disturbed. Have you ever had the experience of visiting a house you’d lived in as a child? And did you observe how much smaller it was than you’d remembered?
I still hold as one of my biggest surprises how tiny was that little theater of the war. Those towns, those villages, those places of battle, Baugnez, Elsenborn, Malmédy—they stand no more than a few miles from each other; they’re local places, not epic plains over which mighty wars should be fought. That morning, we’d crossed the border east of a hamlet whose name, the border guard told us, was Andler; the wolves took us northeast to Losheim.
I didn’t know, because I hadn’t been told, that Miss Begley carried in her possessions a letter from the American embassy in Dublin, saying that she was the “wife of the American Officer, Captain Charles Miller,” and she was to be “shown every courtesy.” Presumably the embassy official wrote it in order to get rid of Kate, but no wonder the wolves howled—with laughter—when one of them found this, and handed it to another, who translated it into German.
They took me in the leading car, and I couldn’t turn my head to see Kate in the car behind. I can still feel my panic. They didn’t manhandle us. In fact, their behavior to her came straight from an officers’ manual on good manners—slight bow, clicked heels, courtesy. No doubt, though, as to their firmness; their black leather gloves touched neither of us—not an arm grip or a clutch on the shoulder; when they walked, we walked.
I saw her face one last time as she climbed into the rear of the car behind. She looked at me in such a stricken way. I had identified the English speaker among them. He was in my trio of captors, and I asked if I might travel with her. He didn’t bother to answer.
And in that car on that morning, I first heard the name Peiper. The wolves mentioned it several times; he was their alpha.
102
Tanks, armored carriers, guns, lines of soldiers; some moved in the direction whence we had come, some the way we were going, some never moved, merely hung around as though awaiting orders. No longer were we behind the German lines, we were in them.
I have to confess my fascination. Although the events in France had appalled me, and had forever annihilated any notion of war’s “romance,” I still stared with great visual hunger at the troops. And then, past a signpost that read MANDERFELD 2, I stared with greater appetite—and shock.
Now I found myself looking at American troops, in tanks and other vehicles with American markings. The officers, in our Mercedes with its German livery, laughed, smiled, and waved at them as our cars inched between them on the narrow roads. Active troops, these Americans were, full of vigor, alert, sharp, and without question on active duty—and respectful as could be to the SS officers in the two cars.
Speculations came at me like arrows. That the German army along here had surrendered? And the Americans hadn’t yet caught up with the ones whom we had driven past earlier? No, that couldn’t be, because we’d been taken by German officers, who were still in some sort of command. That these Americans had been captured? No; they didn’t look like defeated men. That the Germans and the Allies had joined forces? But who could have been the common enemy? A horrid thought struck me: Could the American troops have surrendered—or worse, deserted? They seemed on such friendly terms with our wolves.
Not even thinkable. My speculation went nowhere.
When the wolves saw my intense interest, they muttered amus
ed remarks to one another. Addressing the English speaker, I said, “Has there been a surrender?”
How they laughed—long and out loud.
“No,” said my co-linguist, “no, no, no.” And as he ran out of breath from laughing, the other wolves in the front said in a chorus, “Nein, nein, nein.”
I can still recapture the perturbation that I felt: disoriented, puzzled, confused. Sitting in the backseat of that plush car, with its black leather shiny as fear itself, I ran it through my mind: Yes, these are Americans. Look at the military insignia, the star inside a circle; look at the stenciling, the numbers. Look at the uniforms. Those are American tanks.
It took us several minutes to get through these American lines, and nobody shot at us, or halted us, or took any hostile action. What was going on? In fact, the Americans cleared the roads for us, and waved us through, and the wolves waved back with their gloved paws. And I reflected, “This is a very gentlemanly war that’s being fought here. Or is it?”
I also contemplated what might be taking place in the car behind us. Soon, I would learn that, as they drove past the American tanks and uniforms, they encouraged Miss Begley to take heart. They told her that her husband had been here, and that in fact he’d left some of his clothes behind, and they would soon give them to her.
Alas! Once again she said, “I knew it. Nobody would listen to me, but I knew it.”
And how they laughed.
The American troops gave way to more German soldiery, and I confirmed their identity with my own eyes: the black cross, the different lettering in the stencils. I could have no doubt in my mind—I had just seen hundreds if not thousands of American troops between two similarly large contingents of the German army.
103
Our car swung down a side road. In the wing mirror I glimpsed the following car do the same. Do they mean to keep us together? Are they going to hand us over to the Americans? If so, why didn’t we stop earlier?
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 28