I decided to hide behind Georg’s back just in case, as the fuming woman yanked the door open and slammed it behind her back. She was in her mid-thirties I thought, and looked nothing like I’d imagined her to be. For some reason I always thought that out of all the women he had, Dr. Kaltenbrunner would choose the most beautiful one, but Frau Kaltenbrunner was more than ordinary looking, like many other German women you see every day on the street and won’t even remember their face if you see them the next day. I was very much surprised by such a choice.
Meanwhile, she looked at me with all the hatred in the world and proceeded to the exit. Behind her back Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner opened the door, obviously trying to make her come back.
“Lisl! I’m not joking, take the children away this instant!!!”
“I’ll see you in the evening,” she answered loudly without even turning around and slammed the anteroom’s door.
Dr. Kaltenbrunner quietly cursed under his breath, while Georg buried himself in paperwork on his table, by all means escaping his boss’s look.
“Frau Friedmann, come here.”
What did I do? I almost asked, but followed my chief to his office, keeping my eyes on the floor. Already in the doors, he suddenly nudged two kids, a boy and a girl, towards me.
“Frau Friedmann, this is Hansjorg, and this is Gerthrude. Watch them for me for the rest of the day.”
After that he almost physically pushed all three of us out of his office and closed the door.
“Hey!” I opened it again and walked inside. “What do you think you’re doing? I can’t watch them! I don’t know how!”
“Sure you do, you’re a woman.”
“I don’t have any children! I have no idea what to do with them!”
“Well, neither do I, and I have a lot of papers to go through. Play with them, think of something.” He positioned himself very comfortably in his chair with a cup of coffee and lifted one of the papers from the table, trying to look as busy as possible. “And close the door please.”
I stood there absolutely stunned by such behavior for ten more seconds, and after I realized that there was no way to get out of the babysitting duties, I walked back to the anteroom, where Georg was almost red from hardly contained laughter.
“What are you laughing at?!” I barked at him.
He just shook his head and lifted both hands in the air.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
I turned my head to the children standing in front of me, looking as puzzled as I was. The boy looked older and taller than the girl, but both of them resembled their father greatly.
“So you’re Hansjorg, and you’re Gerthrude, right?”
They nodded.
“My name is Annalise. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you,” they echoed back after a moment’s pause.
Now what do I do? Georg was ready to climb under the table to hide his laughing fit.
“So it’s your birthday today, isn’t it?” I asked the girl, remembering one of the things Frau Kaltenbrunner was yelling in her husband’s office.
“Yes,” she answered indecisively.
“Congratulations! And how old are you now?”
“I’m six.”
“Six? So big!”
I smiled at her but she just pressed her doll closer to her chest, not smiling back at me. I turned to the boy.
“And how old are you, Hansjorg?”
“I’m eight.”
“Eight? You’re very tall for your age. You’ll probably grow as tall as your father, right?” I smiled at both of them. “Are you excited to see your father?”
They looked at the closed door of his office and shrugged indifferently.
“You must be excited, you haven’t seen him in a while!” I tried to put some enthusiasm in them, but in vain.
“He never talks to us anyway,” Gerthrude finally said, petting her doll’s hair.
“He just has a lot of very important work to do.” I tried to explain, but then decided to switch the topic. “So, what do you like to do?”
A shrug again.
“I like to play with dolls, but I only have one with me.”
“I play war with my friends.”
I started to feel hopeless.
“Alright. But you must like the zoo, don’t you? And I bet you’ve never seen lions in the Berlin zoo.”
Finally some interest in children’s eyes.
“And ice cream?”
Faint smiles. I was on the right path.
“I thought so. Good, let’s go, we have a lot of things to see.”
I picked up my purse from under the table and walked the children to the exit under Georg’s surprised stare.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yes, I am. Mind the desk, please. And make Herr Obergruppenführer coffee.”
“Wait! What if I have to… you know, go out for a minute?”
“And that you will discuss with your boss. You, men, are so good in sticking together, you decide how to solve that little problem!”
I closed the door behind me and smiled at his facial expression; he wasn’t laughing anymore.
The children turned out to be perfectly well behaved, and I decided to spoil them rotten as much as I could during our short tour around the German capital. I bought them all the sweets they wanted in the zoo, which they absolutely loved, took them to the park where I knew the biggest playground was and climbed everything I could playing catch with them. I figured that they weren’t used to a grown-up running around and playing with them, so they couldn’t be happier to find such an unexpected play-mate in the face of their father’s secretary.
I decided that if it was my duty to watch them at least for several hours, I wouldn’t be yet another boring adult supervisor, and decided to let them do whatever they wanted. Climbing the tree? No problem, let me just take my shoes off. Build the fort in the sand pit? I’ll buy five bottles of mineral water just for that. Play pirates near the park fountain? You bet! Only when our games started to seem too wild for the police officer who happened to patrol the park, he walked up to me while Gerthrude and I just captured ‘pirate captain’ Hansjorg and were tickling him to make him tell us where he and his invisible ‘crew’ were hiding the treasure.
“What are you doing, Frau? You’re disrupting the order in the public place!”
I left Hansjorg to lay on the ground laughing, got up on my feet and straightened out, allowing the policeman to notice my uniform.
“I’m playing with my kids, do you mind?”
The policeman glanced at me once again, but turned around and walked away, demonstrating visible reluctance.
“Wow! You made him go away!” Hansjorg was looking at me as if I did something impossible. “How did you do that?”
“He’s just a policeman.” I winked at the boy and touched the runes sewn on the left side of my uniform jacket. “And I’m the SS.”
“Are you in the army too?”
“Technically, yes, I am.”
“But women can’t be in the army, can they?”
“We don’t participate in actual battles, but we do… other things.”
“Like what?”
“We help other officers with work,” I answered evasively.
“Are you helping Papa?”
“Yes.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a spy.” I decided to go back to games. When they grow up, they’ll have a lot of opportunities to know what both their father and I were really doing.
“For real?” The boy’s eyes got even bigger. My authority was definitely growing more and more now.
“Yes, for real.”
“And what does Papa do?”
“He supervises all the spies in the whole Reich. That’s why he’s always working. Did you see how many people work in the building with your father? They’re all his subordinates, and without him they won’t be able to do their job.”
“Is he the m
ain spy in the Reich?” asked Gerthrude, taking me by the hand as I was walking with them out of the park back to Heinrich’s car I borrowed.
“You can say that.” I smiled.
“And you help him spy on people?”
“Yes. We travel from place to place, track down the criminals, arrest them and put them in jail.”
“Cool!” Hansjorg took me by the other hand. I smiled at this additional victory. “Did you ever shoot somebody?”
“I never had to,” I smiled.
“Did Papa ever shoot somebody?”
What was I supposed to answer to his eight year old son?
“If he did, I never saw it.”
He seemed a little disappointed. “Papa carries a gun all the time.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Did he ever let you shoot it?”
“No, never.”
“Me neither.” He sighed.
“I’m not promising you the shooting… but how do you feel about holding the real gun?”
Hansjorg was looking at me like at his new best friend. “Do you have one?”
“I don’t. But my husband does. Do you want to go meet him?”
“Yes!”
Heinrich was more than surprised to see me walk the two children inside his office.
“Who’re they?” He nodded at them with a puzzled smile.
“Our new children. Both their parents didn’t want them, so I took them. This is Gerthrude, it’s her sixth birthday today, and this is Hansjorg, and he can’t wait for you to show him your gun.”
“Seriously though, where did you get them from?”
“Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner’s kids. His wife brought them for him to watch, but he’s working.”
“So he dumped them on you.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind. I like them. I’m thinking to take them for good. Now let your new adopted son hold your gun.”
Heinrich chuckled, but took his gun out of the holster under Hansjorg excited stare. After unloading it and making sure there was no bullet inside, my husband placed the heavy weapon into the hands of the mesmerized boy.
“Do you want me to teach you how to shoot it too?”
I just shook my head watching the two position themselves near the open window and taking aim at something outside. Gerthrude seemed to share my feelings.
“Boys are stupid. All they do is play war.”
“Unfortunately it only gets worse as they grow up.”
I sat on the carpet and petted the spot next to me, inviting the girl to join me.
“Will you introduce me to your friend?” I nodded at her doll. “She has a very pretty dress. She must be a princess.”
By Gerthrude’s smile I knew that I had found every girl’s weak spot: princesses and fairytales.
“It’s Rapunzel. Look how long her hair is!”
“Do you want to see the real Rapunzel?”
She nodded several times with an obvious desire. I started taking out all the hair pins out of the tight bun on the back of my head, and, in less than a minute, a cascade of my long golden hair fell all the way to the floor, making the little girl gasp in awe. To produce an ever bigger effect, I shook the hair with my hands, letting it fall all over my shoulders, covering me like a coat.
“Can I touch it?” Gerthrude hardly whispered.
“Go ahead.”
She stretched her hand to the top of my head and carefully brushed her little fingers through my locks.
“You’re so pretty!”
I leaned forward to the girl and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”
She nodded, still stroking my hair with her mouth open.
“I’m a real princess. But you can’t tell anybody because I’m hiding.”
Gerthrude held her breath for a moment.
“If you’re a princess… where’s your princess dress?”
“I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone.”
“I promise,” the girl whispered.
I got up and walked to Heinrich’s desk, on which he kept our wedding picture and the picture of me in my Swan Queen costume. I did look like a princess there, I even had a little crown in my hair. I thought that Gerthrude would love that. She opened her eyes even wider when she saw it.
“You really are a princess?”
I smiled and nodded.
“What happened to your dress? And the crown?”
“You see, a long time ago I lived in the Magic Forest with other forest habitants, the fairies, the gnomes, princes and princesses. And all of us lived in peace with each other, and the harmony was in the forest. All of us had different talents: I could dance, some other fairytale creatures could sing, play different instruments, some could write poems and books, and some write music. We had beautiful forest temples with stars all over them, where we gathered every week to praise our God for such a wonderful life he gave us. We had the best forest doctors who could heal any disease and the best professors who could teach you anything. All we wanted was for our life to be happy and peaceful. But one day an evil sorcerer came into the Kingdom, and he didn’t like that we, the fairytale creatures, were living next to the people of that Kingdom. So he started telling the people that we were planning to start the war with them and take over their lands, because we were evil and not even humans like them. He started telling people that we had to be destroyed or taken into slavery.”
The little girl gasped.
“At first the people of the Kingdom didn’t listen to the sorcerer, so he cast a spell on them, and made them all believe all the lies that he and his minions were spreading. The sorcerer then created an army of the tallest and strongest men he could find and dressed them all in black, and put his symbol, the crossbones and skulls on their clothes. He armed them with swords, and ordered them to go inside the forest and capture any fairytale creature they could find, and then burn them in big ovens he built especially for it.”
Gerthrude pressed her doll closer to her chest, listening to my story with her eyes wide open.
“We, the fairytale creatures, knew that the only way to escape the imminent death was to pretend to be the ordinary people living in the Dark Kingdom under the evil sorcerer rule, because he wouldn’t stop until the last one of us was still breathing. So we took off our beautiful clothes and crowns, and dressed like them, and took their names, and started to act like them, so the evil army wouldn’t find us among them. And that’s why I have to wear this black uniform, so I would look like I belong to the black army, and no one would ever know that I’m really a princess from the Magic Forest.”
Gerthrude, still under impression from my fairy tale, finally asked, “Can you kill the evil sorcerer?”
“It’s very hard to do. He’s always surrounded by his black army, and they will die protecting him.”
“But why are they protecting him if he’s evil?”
“Because he cast a spell on them, and they don’t know what they’re doing.”
“How can you undo the spell?”
“You know how.” I smiled at her. “Only love can undo the spell. See my husband over there? He was in the black army too. And then he fell in love with the princess, she kissed him and he became good again. But we still have to pretend that we’re fighting on the evil sorcerer’s side, so his other soldiers don’t kill us both.”
She looked at Heinrich, still supervising Hansjorg shooting an empty gun at something in the distance, and then at me again. Her brow furrowed and then, after thinking of something for another moment, she asked, “Is Papa in the black army?”
After a moment’s thought I nodded.
“Is he under the evil spell too? That’s why he’s mean?”
“He’s not mean, sunshine. It’s all the sorcerer’s fault. He made him like that.”
“Well then… can you kiss him too to undo his spell so he can become good again?”
I couldn’t contain myself from hugging the little girl tightly, kissed the top of her head and smi
led.
“I’ll try, baby. I’ll try my best.”
_______________
I had just left the familiar bank in Zurich, but this time I let my driver go back home alone, mentioning that I had sick relatives in the city who I wanted to pay a visit to. He was visibly hesitant to do so, and only when I lied that Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner allowed that, did he drive off with the gold in his trunk. It was Friday, and I had to be in the office Monday morning, so my boss wouldn’t even notice my absence anyway.
Zurich was not a big city, so I decided to take a walk to my parents’ house. The absence of flags and banners with swastikas still seemed very unusual to me, and I couldn’t help but think what a wonderful city Berlin used to be a long time ago without all those bloody stamps on every window. Another reason why I wanted to stay in Zurich just for a day was that I could breathe freely here, walk around the streets and not hear the word ‘Gestapo’ on every corner, not see uniforms in every café and not wear one for a change.
I decided to make my happiness complete by getting myself a nice big piece of chocolate cake and coffee. A nearby café looked quiet and inviting, and I sat at a table outside. I was enjoying both my cake and the summer sun when suddenly a man in a dark suit sat right next to me without even asking for my permission. I opened my mouth to let the insolent intruder know that I was waiting for somebody, when he addressed me in English.
“Mrs. Friedmann?”
I instinctually moved away from the man who I saw for the first time in my life and who knew me by my real name, and not as a countess I was pretending to be. I nervously gulped, thinking of what to reply, but then he spoke again.
“No need to be nervous, nobody’s going to hear us talk here. We’ve never met, you don’t know me, but I know you, and I need to talk to you about something important.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand English…” I replied in German, just in case.
He leaned closer to me and looked me straight in the eye with his grey eyes.
“I’m from the same counterintelligence team you’re working for, Mrs. Friedmann.”
My thoughts reminded me of a beehive, in which someone just stuck a stick. Is he from the Gestapo? Do they have agents who speak immaculate American English? How does he know me? What shall I answer? Shall I answer at all? Have I been compromised?
The Girl from Berlin: Gruppenführer's Mistress Page 22