The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

She felt sure Cordelia would approve.

  Even so, she couldn’t settle. Leaving the library, she moved restlessly around the house, going from room to room. The air raid, and her glimpse of the Führer, had transformed into a pent-up nervousness about what was yet to come.

  Retreating to the kitchen, she poured some of the water that she regularly boiled and stored in preserving jars. If there was any alcohol she would drink it, but she was saving the last of Ernst’s schnapps for something really serious. With a paring knife she peeled a potato she had bought on the way home, put the pan on to boil, and was standing over it, feeling the warmth seep into her bones, when there was a knock at the door.

  Through the window Irene peered into the gloom, and when she made out the wild and cadaverous figure on the porch, her hand flew up to her mouth.

  * * *

  —

  OSKAR BLUM WAS IN a desperate condition. The fleshy jollity had been replaced with a lean, sinewy frame, and his face had the strained pallor of a man twenty years older. She ushered him inside, with a snatched glance up the road toward the Wannsee House, and bundled him into the library, where An Introduction to Reich Labor Law had now caught fire with a creeping violet flame.

  She brought him the bread she had been about to eat and watched, still standing, as he grabbed it and crammed it into his mouth, before washing it down with hot-water soup, as though it was the finest meal he had ever tasted. His hands were trembling as he bit into the crust of bread and tore at it, scarcely pausing to swallow.

  “How have you survived, Oskar?”

  His eyes met hers frankly. Experience had etched his face like acid, washing away all the hope and the happiness.

  “From day to day.”

  He was scanning the room. Years of hiding and hypervigilance had made every movement jerky and abrupt. He wore a filthy overcoat the color of dirt and a ragged scarf.

  “Shortly after I last saw you I managed to get a job—with papers and everything, but one day I came home and found two hefty brutes standing in front of my door. An old brute and a younger one. They had come for me. I couldn’t escape, so I went into the apartment to collect my things and left with them. I waited until the younger one turned to seal the door before I threw my suitcase at the knees of the old one and ran for it. He tripped and fell down the stairs and I was praying that the outer door was not locked, but it was open so I made it across the city. From that moment on, though, I knew I would be going underground.”

  Irene handed him the remainder of the soup and he gulped it down.

  “Where’s your star?”

  He smiled bleakly. “In my pocket. At first I wore one, though only in the Jewish areas; the rest of the time, where I was not known, I’d tear it off. I kept a needle and thread so I could sew it on when I needed. Then I came up with a plan. I had a patron—a wealthy widow who’d bought a few of my paintings before the war—and I sent her a letter saying I intended to commit suicide by drowning myself in the Müggelsee. She marched off to the police and tried to pull strings to have them drag the lake.”

  The ghost of his sardonic laugh rose at this but died before he could give it breath.

  “As if the police would waste resources dragging a lake for a dead Jew.”

  “But it meant they thought you were dead.”

  “That was the idea.” He grimaced. “Unfortunately our noble police force are not so easy to fool. It was only a few weeks before I learned they were still searching for me. Waldo got me a new identity.” He pulled off his shoe and withdrew a wedge of wood. “And this gave me a limp.”

  “Why?”

  “I need an injury. What else would I be doing out of uniform? A young man like me?”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “I did. For a while I worked in a factory—not your husband’s—in Pankow, assembling metal parts for armaments. Night shifts. Ten hours a day at a machine. Even though I traveled without a star, I had to watch out for the catchers. There was a woman I used to know, Suzi, very Aryan looking, blond with blue eyes, but a Jew all the same. My family had been friends with hers, and we attended the same Shul. She appeared at the factory where I was working and I knew she’d recognize me, so I went off sick. I had to feign infectious jaundice.”

  “That’s not easy.”

  “Believe me, it can be done. I took twelve atabrine tablets a day for five days, and by the end of it I had turned completely yellow.”

  A thought struck Irene. “Would you like some schnapps? I’ve been saving a couple of bottles.”

  She might as well have promised him heaven. When she extracted the bottle, Oskar downed the first glass in one gulp.

  “Lord, that’s good! I haven’t had a decent drink in years. I couldn’t risk being intoxicated and saying something.”

  Irene thought of her encounter with Heydrich years before. Her drunken joke. I can see why it’s called My Struggle. I struggled to get past the first chapter.

  Carefully she poured another glass and said, “I’ve been working at the Jewish hospital. As a nurse. I looked for your sister. But I can’t find her. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

  Oskar shook his head. “God knows what’s happened to her.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Oskar sighed, then threw himself into an armchair, leaned back, and rested his hand over his eyes.

  After a time Irene asked, “What will you do now?”

  He shrugged. “Do? What do you think? I’m exhausted. I’ve run out of safe houses. I’ve used up my ration of luck. I’m going to stay here.”

  “With the SS a hundred meters down the road?”

  “Not for long. Just for a while.”

  “You must be mad! Soldiers march past here every day. They have all kinds visiting that villa. All the police chiefs. Himmler.”

  “All the more reason. They say hide in plain sight.”

  “Forgive me, Oskar, but you simply can’t. This house is so visible. If anyone saw you here you’d be taken straight off to camp and I’d be denounced and then…”

  Then a trial in the People’s Court, where people went for entertainment and brought sandwiches and apples and cheered when death sentences were handed down.

  Oskar jumped up and began stalking the room, examining the contents in minute detail before stopping in front of one of Irene’s own paintings. It was her portrait of the teenage Cordelia against the honeysuckle wall at Birnham Park, wearing a flowered cotton dress and dazed with the heat. The painting Ernst had bought from her graduating exhibition. Oskar peered more closely at the brushwork, then stepped back.

  “Did you paint this?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s quite good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is this your sister? The journalist?”

  “Yes.”

  “If she heard what I’m asking, what would she say?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Irene did, though. Despite herself, she heard the voice of Martha Dodd.

  Don’t ask if your sister would forgive you for staying. Ask if she would forgive you for leaving, when you could do something to help.

  “You did the right thing once before, Irene.”

  Did Oskar know? That her secret exchanges with Waldo had continued?

  “Besides.” His eyes were locked on hers. “It won’t be for long. Every time I listen to the Führer with his plans on the wireless, I think of that Yiddish saying Der Mentsh trakht un Got lakht. Man plans, God laughs. He’s been laughing at Hitler since the battle of Stalingrad. The punch line will come when the Russians arrive.”

  “Then let’s pray the Allies arrive first.”

  “Whoever it is, I’ll tell them you helped. I’ll say you dedicated yourself to saving Jews.”

  “I don’t care about that. It’s you I’m t
hinking of.”

  “Then let me stay.”

  Still she hesitated.

  “Irene?”

  “I don’t know…It’s too dangerous. Where would you hide?”

  For the first time since he appeared, Oskar’s soot-stained face cracked into its old, recognizable smile.

  “I have an idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  BERLIN, 2016

  “So what do you think?”

  Juno and Matthias had walked to the far end of the garden, where a painted wooden jetty projected into the lake. The lemony gauze of air was studded with insects, and a dragonfly drifted past, as blue as the phosphorescence of a match flaring into life.

  “It’s beautiful. How could I think anything else? There’s something about this house that feels cut off from the world. Like a sanctuary from everything.”

  “I know what you mean. Most people who pass here are visiting the House of the Wannsee Conference, just along the street. You know what that is? The place where they planned the Final Solution of the Jews in 1942? Or they come to see the Max Liebermann museum the other way. They don’t give this place a second glance. Are you staying long in Berlin?”

  She was about to answer when suddenly, the possibility came to her. She had planned on flying home in a week, but why not stay? For the first time since she had left college, her life belonged to no one but herself. She had no lover to consider, no pressing work, and the small amount of her mother’s inheritance to tide her over.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If you would allow me to give some advice, I would say take this place. It is lovely in summer and the rent is reasonable.”

  She laughed. “For a family, maybe. I’m really sorry if I misled you, Herr Weber, but the fact is, I’m a freelance writer. A place like this is way beyond my budget. The most I can afford at the moment is a grotty single room in Kreuzberg.”

  Smiling, he shrugged. “It’s been vacant a while. It is not good for houses to stand empty. It needs a tenant. If you wanted, I could recommend you for a short-term let at a competitive rate.”

  “Not sure it could compete with Kreuzberg,” she teased.

  “But you will let me try?”

  “If you insist. But I really don’t think…”

  “I will recommend you.”

  She laughed again. “You’re very kind.”

  “Not at all. It’s ideal for a writer too. I never get tired of this view.”

  Below them, rippled water lapped gently at the banks, and ducks dived into the tangle of weeds in the shallows. White-sailed yachts passed, heading up the Havel. All around them the fragrance of moss mingled with fern. A bee floated past, drunk with nectar.

  “Have you always been interested in gardening?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Truth is, I’m not a real gardener at all. You must be able to tell, this place is half wild. But I do get a huge amount of pleasure from digging what I can, and nurturing seedlings. Those beans over there”—he pointed to a tangle of vivid green stems snaking up hazel poles—“they are my current pride. In my real life I am an architect. I have a practice in Wilmersdorf. We’ve been busy on a project next to the Hauptbahnhof, so I haven’t been coming here as often as I’d like.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you need a second job.”

  “I don’t. I do it purely out of sentiment. I used to come to this house when I was a kid.”

  “So you must have known…I mean, is it possible you knew Irene Weissmuller?”

  She held her breath for his answer.

  He nodded. “Of course. That is why I came here. Back in the nineteen sixties, after the war, my mother worked as Irene’s housekeeper. Irene adored this garden—she put years of work into it—and after she died I never thought I would see it again. Then one day I was passing and I saw the place was for rent. I contacted the management company and made this arrangement to keep the garden up. Partly because it was what she would have wanted, but the other part, I confess, was pure nostalgia. I don’t know much about gardening, but anything I do know, Irene taught me.”

  It was as though the past had reached out and touched her.

  “What was she like?” A jolt of excitement ran through Juno, and she tried to suppress the urgency in her question.

  Matthias paused, squinting into the lake, then shook his head as if assessing something too complex to capture in words.

  “I can’t really say. I was only a child. My mother would bring me in my school holidays and Irene let me have the run of the garden and swim here in the lake. Mutti would not allow me to wander much in the house, but in bad weather I could sit in the kitchen, with a book, under strict instructions not to make a noise. Not that Irene cared. She would set me up an easel beside hers and let me paint. She liked to paint me too, and if I fidgeted she just laughed. When I got interested in drawing, she paid for my classes. But while my parents were not rich, they were proud and they would not accept charity, so eventually the classes stopped. Irene still taught me a lot though—she’s the reason I can speak to you in English.”

  “Did she tell you about her own life? Her family, and before the war?”

  He shook his head. “She never talked about that kind of thing. People didn’t then. This was the seventies. Berlin was still divided. The Wall was up. No one discussed the war. It was the future we were interested in.”

  The familiar sinking feeling returned. The past had been buried and no one was inclined to disinter it.

  “What about Irene’s sister?”

  “She never mentioned a sister. Her husband died in the Ukraine, I think, in 1942. But I was a kid, remember. I was born in ’sixty-nine. No one tells kids anything. Ah, excuse me…I have to take this.”

  He broke off to answer his phone, and Juno moved away. She liked the sound of his voice. She had always thought of German as a harsh utilitarian language, yet this man’s soft full-throated vowels, coupled with sharp consonants, sounded curiously seductive.

  When he returned, she said, “Do you really think you can wrangle me a good rate?”

  “Trust me.”

  “You know…I think I do.” She smiled. “I saw some coffee beans in the kitchen. Would it be presumptuous of me to make some to celebrate?”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  BERLIN, 1945

  Oskar’s hiding place was the best in Berlin. The carpentry skills he boasted of were real, and after transporting some boards from the boathouse and excavating the gardener’s tool kit, he sealed off the alcove at the end of the library with an entire set of shelves that could be shifted into place at a moment’s notice. Behind was a narrow space, and the window he boarded up from within. It was not an ideal solution, but many houses had windows boarded up because of the blackout, and besides, it was not visible from the street.

  He timed himself opening the cavity and sealing himself up again until it could be done within a minute.

  “No different from a shelter really,” he announced, folding himself inside with a grin. “You see! I’ll need for nothing.”

  “Except food,” remarked Irene, grimly.

  How was she going to find twice as much food with no extra ration card and hardly a vegetable in the frost-hardened beds? When she had first arrived as a young bride, Irene had paid great attention to her garden, planting roses and clematis, adding cherry and apples trees and herbaceous borders nodded over by delphiniums and staked sunflowers, hoping to re-create the careless abandon of Birnham Park. Once the war started, gardens, like clothing and food, were subject to a new order, and her verdant lawn had been replaced by regulated rows of leeks, cabbage, and asparagus, but when the gardener left, all those had been neglected, and the sour earth yielded nothing more than the occasional half-rotted potato.

  In the days after Oskar’s arrival she ranged across the city buying
cheese and smoked bacon on the black market and stretching the weekly loaf of bread allowed from her rations. She exchanged a flashlight for several tins of corned beef and sardines, and bartered batteries for two eggs that she swaddled in an old cardigan inside her bag and several potatoes that she fried into Kartoffelpuffer pancakes.

  She spent an hour in the queue for Mendel’s, her regular butcher, shuffling her thin-soled shoes on the snowy pavement. Gossip flickered like flames through the frozen crocodile of women; rumors of uprisings, tales of coups against the Führer, suggestions that Himmler had been in contact with the Americans. Reports of the Russian advance. Stout Herr Mendel, who portrayed himself as a warmhearted man of the people, was an endless fund of jokes, but Irene never trusted him enough to reply.

  By the time her turn came, Mendel was reaching for the iron shutters to close up.

  “I’m sorry, meine Frau. We have nothing.” He spread a hand across the empty cabinet and assumed a regretful air. “Perhaps if you were to return tomorrow.”

  In dismay, Irene surveyed the empty tiles, spattered with blood and flecks of fat. During the war, Berliners had got used to eating the worst bits of every animal, the lungs and the brain and the hooves, but now not even the toughest scrap of gristle remained.

  Then, looking up at a canvas partition just behind Mendel’s head, she glimpsed an inch of brown gray fur.

  A rabbit’s ear.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing?”

  He smiled, greasily, and wiped a hand on his bloody apron.

  “It’s difficult, Frau Weissmuller. I can’t make exceptions. Not even for loyal customers. Not for the most special of my ladies.”

  Summoning her sweetest smile, Irene sighed. “I know that, Herr Mendel, but sometimes I think I’d give anything for a bit of rabbit stew.” She tilted her head and paused. “You know, I dream of rabbit. It was always my absolute favorite.”

  The butcher’s eyes dipped to her wrist. “It’s getting late…do you have the time?”

  She followed his glance.