The Matchmaker of Kenmare

by Frank Delaney

  As the darkness fell in earnest, a young officer walked into the tent, eager and nervous.

  “You are to come with me,” he said to Kate. When she rose, he moved to take her bag and then seemed—I guessed—to remind himself that she was his prisoner, and he checked. Over her shoulder he said to me, “I’m the one who speaks English here, I will come back for you.”

  I saw that he looked at the book in my hand.

  Within minutes he strode back into the tent and gestured like a boss. He turned and I followed him, down the sodden and muddy path to a smaller tent, in which sat three soldiers, one an officer.

  “We need to speak English better,” he said. “Can you speak with an American accent, do you know American slang? Speak to us.”

  Saying to somebody “Speak to us” poses a challenge that it’s oddly hard to meet. Say what? What shall I speak? Recite verse?

  “I’ve never tried to imitate an American accent,” I said. “But I come from Ireland, and the Irish are renowned for speaking good English.”

  One of the men said, in a thick German tone (Heaven help him if they wanted to pass him off as American), “Tell us story.”

  “A story?” I echoed, and the young earnest officer said, “Tell us the story of your family. In Ireland. Tell us slow, and explain words.”

  And so I told them the story of my father and his farming, of Mother and her bookkeeping and beekeeping. And I told them the story of Venetia Kelly, who had been my wife for no longer than a matter of weeks, and how the ship’s captain who married us had said to me, “If she were my bride I’d smile every time I looked at her.”

  And I told them of Blarney, her ventriloquism dummy, who was harsh and irascible and satirical and sometimes even funny, and how I never allowed myself to think that his vile sentiments and foul attitudes were coming out of the mouth of this glorious woman.

  And I told them how somebody—evil people—came for this tall and lovely creature in the middle of the night, and how she had left all her money behind, and how they had decapitated the dummy, Blarney, and left his head in the street outside the front door of our house.

  And finally I told them how I had, ever since, roamed the roads of Ireland, gathering stories, yes, and collecting songs and tunes, but in truth looking for my dear, lost wife, and how I asked everywhere, and I showed them the photograph of Venetia.

  In that little German tent, on that rainy, cold evening dark with threat, with those young German boys, that’s all they were, boys, each one younger than I, listening, listening to the sad story of a young Irishman—the war stopped for just a few minutes.

  As they left, each soldier patted me on the arm or shook my hand, and I knew we weren’t enemies and never would be, these boys and I. Enemies are natural creatures, like friends or lovers or couples.

  107

  Into my minuscule sector of the war, that soggy and wind-scoured tent where I sat, unguarded, on a folding chair, crept one more positive force.

  Half an hour or so after the soldiers had left, the young officer came back, accompanied by an orderly, or a soldier at a menial level, who carried food—a tin bowl with some meat and potatoes, and a mug of hot and sticky coffee. When I’d found a way of managing all this on my chair, the menial was ordered back to his supply wagon or wherever he’d been.

  The young officer said, “May I ask about the book you have been reading?”

  I said, “It’s my most treasured possession,” and I handed it to him.

  “Who are Wandering Scholars?” he said.

  “Probably among your ancestors,” I replied. “Men who wandered through the European countryside, writing poems and reading them to people.”

  He handled the book as a priest handles a chalice.

  “Homer is my hero,” he said. “I have not seen a book for close to a year.”

  “Please have that,” I said. “As my gift.”

  He recoiled and thrust the book at me. “I cannot do that. I cannot. No, I cannot.”

  “Please. As a gift from one reader to another.”

  “No, I mustn’t. But if I give you my name and address, will you write after the war? And we may meet and speak of Homer?”

  “And Virgil,” I said.

  “And Dante. Do you know Dante, Dante is also my hero? I do not know Virgil.”

  “Then you can teach me about Dante, and I can teach you about Virgil,” I said.

  “And Wandering Scholars?” he said. He scribbled his name and postal address on the inside rear cover of my book.

  “Yes,” I said. “Always Wandering Scholars. Perhaps you will come to Ireland and travel with me.”

  He stepped back farther and, to my shock, saluted.

  I said, “I’m not an officer, I’m not even a soldier.”

  He replied, “My father was an officer in the last war, and he taught me that we must salute gentlemen as well as officers.”

  As he ducked through the flap, he half-turned and said, “Your friend, she will be all right. I promise.”

  When he had gone, I looked at the name in the book: “Stefan Bekker.” In Ireland, as in all villages, everybody knows everybody else. My father—and mother, even though she’s more withdrawn—always tried to make connections.

  “Now what O’Connors are they?” my father would ask regarding a new family, and I’d heard that kind of inquiry almost every day of my life. Thus, no matter how vast the country, I was conditioned to assume that people were related to each other.

  Now I saw the name “Bekker” and remembered the young man who came from the sea that morning of rain and gray mist.

  That night, I thought I would freeze and drown. Nobody came to guard me; they reasoned that I wouldn’t get far in this weather—and that I would make no attempt to escape on account of Kate. They gave me a sleeping bag, allegedly waterproof, which it wasn’t. The wind whipped the rain into the tent, and the rain turned to sleet and cut into my face, no matter which way I turned.

  Believe it or not, I did sleep. It took a long time, principally because of Kate, about whom I worried with the same throb of desperation I’d had when Venetia disappeared. My young officer had promised to take care of her, but was he even in the camp anymore? All sorts of possibilities, from Peiper down, flooded my mind: The wife of an American officer—what finer plaything could they have found?

  In the interests of chronology, I include now Kate’s account of what happened to her when they took us separately away. She had managed to get herself into much more salubrious circumstances, a local house managed by Belgian women, who had been commandeered to look after the senior officers while Peiper was billeted there.

  From all the evidence, Kate seems not to have believed Peiper. Here is her—surprisingly calm—journal for that night, scribbled on pages from a school homework jotter that one of the women gave her.

  Now I know why we need faith. Why we need forces greater than us and more mysterious. They sustain us. But what is my faith tonight? Since my marriage I’ve discovered that much of my faith comes from my own self. I pray, God knows I pray (that’s quite funny, I now see), but it’s not the praying, it’s the belief. That’s what has sustained me. My belief may come from the wind, for all I know.

  I am sitting in a nice bedroom, in a house near a village in Belgium, not far from the German border. It doesn’t feel as if I’m a prisoner, but I am. So, this is what has happened to me, and I’m trying to understand it. When I met Charles I said to myself, “This is your fate.”

  Is this war a lesson to me? Is it saying I must understand that I intrude into people’s lives? And that from now on I must do it more sincerely, more responsibly? I forced myself into Charles’s life, and more or less forced him to marry me. Then I forced myself into his work, which is how I came to be here. And look at what I’ve done to Ben—the kindest, most loyal friend in the world. If I get out of here alive, I will do penance.

  The women who look after me here have been nicer than I expected. One speaks French and
a little English. A young officer came to the house twice and asked the women if everything was all right. He saluted me very formally, and he told me the name of the man in charge today, Jochen Peiper, who is like a colonel or something, not a general. I can tell that he’s a very competent man, but he’s also frightening. Do I believe that Charles tried to kill him? Do I believe that he has had Charles killed? I don’t know what to believe.

  I’ve been coaching the women on how to make marriages, and they are very interested. And I have read their palms, and told them that they will all be safe.

  108

  Next morning, I heard artillery, and Stefan Bekker came to the tent.

  “You must come with me now. I have orders.”

  Through the mud we ran. I had no bag; I had time only to make sure that I had my book and notebook in my pocket. We made it to the Peiper house without falling into the mud, but I could tell as we climbed the little steps to the porch that Peiper had gone—that’s how much force he had.

  Kate stood inside.

  “They wouldn’t let me bring my bag,” she said.

  Stefan Bekker asked, “In the house?” and when Kate nodded, he ran. Within minutes he came back with the bag. “Tell nobody I did this,” he said.

  The three of us stood there as soldiers raced in and out. Then one of the wolves appeared in the hallway and spoke in a hard voice to Stefan Bekker. Kate told me later that he said, “You are to shoot the spies.”

  An argument broke out—very brief; I saw the wolf leave, his long leather coat darkening with rain spots, and Stefan Bekker said, “We have to go.”

  We stood in the front doorway, stepping aside now and then out of the way of men bringing out files, clothing, and equipment.

  One of the cars that brought us there the previous day drew up.

  “We get in,” said Stefan Bekker.

  Inside, I asked, “Can you tell us where we’re going?”

  He turned from the front seat and looked at me, shaking his head very slightly, and in a voice more unfriendly than his face said, “Please do not ask. You are prisoners of the Reich. You are being taken to the train station.”

  I understood his circumspectness in front of the driver.

  Neither Kate nor I knew the implications of the train, and wouldn’t know—like everybody else in the West—until long after the war, when the news broke of the cattle wagons to the concentration camps. But Stefan Bekker knew.

  I said to him, on an impulse, “Do you have a brother serving also?”

  He almost broke his neck, so hard did he swivel his head.

  “What are you asking?”

  “Do you have a brother? In the navy? With a little daughter? Nadia?”

  “His name is Frederik. How do you know?”

  How often has this happened to me? How often have I encountered coincidences so unlikely, so preposterous, that would have seemed and sounded ridiculous had they happened to someone else? I used to think it only occurred in my life; now I know it’s universal.

  I told him—the full story. No matter how many years have passed, I can still reach out and touch the sadness that I felt when I discovered what had befallen his brother. It still grieves me—especially after that morning in the mud.

  We eased out of the lane that led from the house and joined a line of military traffic. It moved at about ten miles per hour, hemmed in by lines of marching soldiers. Ahead, two of the half-tracks had left the road and gone into the woods, following a tank. Along that stretch, the trees stood wide enough apart to let the tanks and troop carriers through.

  Our driver spurted, and we caught up with the vehicles in front. As we turned a bend, we could see through the rain a steep hill rising ahead. The road, axle-deep in mud, slowed us down so much that the marching soldiers passed us by. It took an hour to get close to the summit of that hill, which was flanked by dense woods.

  I looked back. We had become the last vehicle in the long convoy. Those behind us must have peeled off into the trees. The last of the soldiers had also trudged past us.

  We stopped completely. The rain turned to heavy snow. Stefan Bekker said something to the driver, who climbed out and went forward. We saw him walk to a truck five or six vehicles ahead, and as he engaged somebody in conversation, Stefan Bekker turned to us.

  “Go now.” So urgent.

  “Where?” said Kate.

  “Into the trees. Keep going west.” Even more urgent.

  “But we’ll get shot.”

  He smiled at her. “No. The Americans are near. Go west.” He wagged a pointing hand. “West. Go!”

  He climbed out of the car, ran in the opposite direction, and disappeared into the snow and the trees.

  I never saw Stefan Bekker again. After the war, I wrote to the address that he had written in my book—somewhere near Limburg; I wrote three, four times, but I never heard from him. I’ve been tempted to try to find him through war records, but I fear that he died, and anyway I think that I’d rather be accompanied by the Stefan Bekker I’d met with my Wandering Scholars.

  Kate dragged her bag from the car and I grabbed it from her. I can’t say that we ran. Nobody could. The mud massaged our ankles. Cold speared my throat.

  She said, “Oh, Jesus. Jesus God.”

  The trees, tall and cold, offered no welcome. They hid us, though. Behind, I heard shouting and gunshots. The driver had come back—I could see him. He didn’t know where to look and fired his gun into the woods on the other side of the road. A flurry of snow, driven by the wind, forced his arms to his face. Now he looked in our direction. He couldn’t see us, not in that dense dark.

  But I could see him, clearly across the snow. As he looked around, not knowing where to fire, somebody called him from up the hill—Sebastian Volunder, who began limping down to our car. He had dressed in the white uniform of Alpine soldiers.

  As I watched, he turned, called, and beckoned to the troops behind him. One, two, four, eight soldiers walked down to where he stood and inspected our footprints on the slope above the road.

  109

  With Kate’s damn bag heavy in my hand, we began to run. The forest loomed toward us; we crashed into it. She kept up. Despite the clothes, the hair, the shoes, she ran like a goat. She jumped. She swerved. She danced. And now, in the deep trees, it was dark enough to lose us. And wild enough to stop us. And cold enough to kill us.

  All of this I knew as we ran like blinded animals.

  “West,” Stefan Bekker had said, and “West,” I said to Kate Begley, and she said, “Who knows where west is?”

  I reckoned that we had three hours before the night fell on top of us; the darkness would multiply the chances of freezing death.

  “We’ll just keep going,” I said.

  And she said, “We’re due some luck.”

  To which I said nothing.

  Here, in order that you grasp the essence of what we went through, I’ll tell you what I learned after the war about Volunder. Then you’ll appreciate the pack that followed on our heels.

  After Peiper and Volunder came up together through the ranks of the German cavalry, they contrived to stay close together. All through the 1930s, Peiper kept rising in rank above Volunder, who was considered unstable—a reputation that didn’t prevent him being part of Hitler’s ceremonial guard at the 1936 Olympics.

  As the appetite for war surged, Peiper became known to Himmler—to whom he then introduced Volunder. Himmler, a chicken farmer before the war, had always longed for what he couldn’t have—the air of an aristocrat. So he took it vicariously from Volunder, and from the even more cosmopolitan Peiper, whose fluency in English and French had enhanced his standing as a man of style.

  When Peiper joined Himmler’s staff, he had no difficulty bringing Volunder with him. On 29 June 1939, Peiper married Himmler’s secretary, with Volunder as best man. On 3 September, the two men went by train into Poland to inspect labor camps. (In one of war’s more striking ironies, Peiper once inspected the camp at Dachau,
where he would later be tried as a war criminal.)

  Now Volunder began to come into his own standing. In January 1940, he went with Himmler deeper into Poland. Leaving Peiper behind on purely military matters, Volunder watched Himmler carry out a symbolic execution of a Polish intellectual—and then took over.

  Some people he killed quickly, with a gun. He slit the throats of others. And some he killed slowly, especially the women, the wives of the professors and the doctors and the teachers.

  In which case, why had he been Peiper’s friend, Peiper the consummate soldier, Peiper the remarkable commander? Who can say? Nothing makes stranger bedfellows than a uniform. Especially in war.

  110

  For ten minutes, ten surging, running minutes—and maybe more—we ran and scrambled and stumbled through that forest in the Ardennes. I had a dilemma: Should I lead and make smooth a path—insofar as I could—or should I follow and protect Kate’s back? I compromised—we went side by side. I held her bag; she held my other hand. Hansel and Gretel. Running from Death.

  We made progress. The terrain proved less difficult, more level than I’d expected, and this wood hadn’t been recently planted—the trees had been there thirty years and more.

  She stopped, to draw breath. I tried to look behind, but could see no more than maybe twenty yards. And I shuddered at how clear a trail we’d left in the deep snow. How far behind could they be?

  Not far. Not “they.” Him. One man. No others. Do I want to say that he had a limp? And that he wore a black-and-cream silk polka-dot handkerchief in his white uniform cuff? Yes, I do want to say that, but I can’t—or to be more truthful, I don’t know.

  I do know that when I looked back I saw something. Something that moved. Not a branch, not a black tree, not a deer or some animal sliding down the deep snow. This was quicker. And it stopped. Kate saw it too. She struck my arm with hers. By now the cold was once again limiting the use of her hands. She used them to balance, her arms held out. A stumble might mean a ravine we hadn’t seen. This was a foot, maybe two, of old snow.