by Jane Thynne
Like those of the Trümmerfrauen, her clothes were shabby and worn, yet it was clear that the cream blouse and black tailor-made suit had once been expensive. Her honey blond hair was rolled up into a bun, and she wore no makeup. Yet even in her ravaged state there was a strained beauty in her gaunt face. She did not glance round as Cordelia entered. She remained frozen, eyes unfocused.
Irene.
“Ah, miss…” Lieutenant Thompson jumped up and consulted his clipboard. “Miss Capel. Do come in and set yourself up on that desk over there. You haven’t missed anything, we’re just starting. Not for the first time, I’m sorry to say. We’ve had a couple of meetings already, and this will be the last one.”
Irene didn’t move a muscle, but at the mention of Cordelia’s name she gave an almost imperceptible start.
Thompson returned to his chair and settled down again with a loud sigh. He was in his twenties, Cordelia guessed, with the green tinge of a bad hangover and a plaster on his chin where he had cut himself shaving. He swiped at the sweat on his face with a grubby handkerchief. His tone was not cruel or unkind, merely flat with tedium. He dragged at his cigarette as if to jump-start the day, then stubbed it out and sighed again.
“This woman is the widow of a high-ranking Party member and an associate of numerous senior Nazis. She was arrested in the company of an SS officer, and there were signs that she was planning to escape Berlin. She had destroyed her passport already. We want her to talk and we want the details of her associates, but I’m afraid she doesn’t know what’s in her best interests. She’s not saying a dickey bird.”
Irene looked, if possible, more beautiful than ever. Her weight loss accentuated the high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and the generous curve of her lips. Yet beneath the impassive exterior was…desperation, certainly, but who would not be desperate in her situation? It was the same for any women left in Berlin. She should count herself lucky, Cordelia thought. At least she was safe in a cell and not stepping over corpses or stacking bricks with her bare hands in return for food vouchers. The officer had described Irene as a widow, so Ernst must have died, and that would have caused her sorrow, but she deserved anything that was coming to her. She had befriended the Nazis and married one. She had entertained them and apologized for them. She must have known about the mass executions, the slaughter, and the camps. She, and people like her, were responsible for millions of deaths.
Torin’s death.
He held out.
“I’ve explained to this lady that this will be her last opportunity to discuss her involvement. After that it will be compulsory detention.” Thompson leaned toward Irene as if addressing a dim child. “Detention. You know what that means? It means prison. What’s the word for prison, Miss Capel?”
“Gefängnis.”
“Thank you. My guess is she’s gambling that prison can’t be any worse than the detention center she’s in already.” Thompson frowned. “But it can, I promise you that, Frau Weissmuller. It’s no holiday camp.”
Cordelia squared the Underwood on the desk and repositioned the stack of paper and carbons.
“I know you understand me, Frau Weissmuller.” Impatience prompted Thompson to adopt a tone of loud, decelerated English. “I can see it going in, even if you don’t speak the language.”
A drop of sweat slid from his forehead onto the tabletop. Irene did not fidget or twitch. Her intense, watchful stillness was as impervious as a physical entity, Cordelia thought, a wall, constructed over years, with each and every vulnerability camouflaged. She was a life model before a class of fumbling students. Her posture, with the erect back, was genteel, as though she was attending a play rather than her own inquisition.
Cordelia fixed her gaze stubbornly on the keyboard, busying herself with adjusting the set of the page, resting her fingers on the shining metal.
“I wonder, Lieutenant…” She turned to Thompson with her best beseeching smile. “I know it’s awfully unorthodox, especially on my first day, but if you allow me a few moments alone with this woman, I think I can get her to talk.”
Thompson squinted in surprise and rubbed his temple. Raising the volume had made his headache worse.
“I’m not sure about that, Miss Capel. We tend to do things by the book here…”
“Of course. I wasn’t suggesting. Maybe just for a few minutes. If you wanted to get a cup of coffee or something.”
Coffee. The magic word.
She smiled sweetly. “You know how we women are. Sometimes we say things to each other that we would never say to a man.”
Thompson was too young to know how women were, but he thought he did, and that was enough.
“I suppose there’s no harm in trying.”
He got to his feet with renewed cheer. “I’ll have to lock you in, I’m afraid. But any trouble, just bang on the door. The staff sergeant will be here in a jiffy.”
The door slammed, and silence settled like ash.
Cordelia reeled in a fresh sheet of paper and fixed in the carbon behind as if this was just another prisoner, having her testimony recorded and typed. Some of the typewriter keys had inked up in their journey, and she took out a hairpin to clean them. She carried out this task with deliberation, fingers only slightly trembling. She saw the flicker of Irene’s eye, a swift transit of the iris, but otherwise she didn’t stir. The thought crossed Cordelia’s mind that in the years they had been apart, every cell in their bodies, every fiber of muscle and bone, had been replaced. Not a drop of blood remained of the girls they once were. She had not seen her sister since 1936. They were as far away as humanly possible from the sisters they had been.
She put the hairpin in her bag and said, “Start talking.”
Irene did not respond. But she did move to rest her elbow on the table with her chin cupped in one palm, facing the wall.
“Just tell me everything about your association with Ernst and his friends. From the moment you understood their status in the regime, to the degree to which you were obliged…or indeed, decided, to support their activities.”
“Don’t be like this, Cordelia.” Irene’s voice emerged low and hoarse, as though she had not spoken for weeks.
“We don’t need to discuss anything else.”
“For heaven’s sake.”
Irene spoke as if it had been a matter of days since they last saw each other, rather than years. As though their intimacy was entirely unbroken.
“I’m here in my capacity as a representative of the occupation forces.”
“Dee…”
“You’ve probably been told that whatever you say here will go toward the final decision on your immediate future.”
Again, Cordelia adjusted the paper and carbon, as if the act of aligning it with complete precision would produce the correct response. As if anything could ever be correct between them again. “I’ll start it for you, shall I?”
She typed a little, then read aloud.
“This is the testimony of Frau Irene Weissmuller. Born June twentieth, 1914, London.”
The fact of Irene’s birthday, and all her past birthdays, collected between them in the air.
“I married Ernst Weissmuller on June twenty-fifth, 1936, and came to live in Berlin Wannsee.”
The detail of her sister’s letters, studied so often, streamed through Cordelia’s mind.
“Due to his position as chairman of Weissmuller and Sons, our associates included National Socialists of the highest level, including Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, and Doktor Robert Ley…”
“Dee…”
“My husband and I were on close personal terms with the aforementioned and others, and were often invited to their homes…”
“Please.”
Irene held out a hand to halt her. Cordelia flinched as though the fingers might be contaminated.
“Stop.”
Irene’s voice, so clear and authoritative, triggered a wave of fury that had, until that moment, been pent up inside Cordelia. Words rushed out so hot with anger they choked her.
“Stop? You’re asking me to stop? Why should I stop? Do the facts offend you? None of you damn Nazis stopped what you were doing, even if it cost millions of lives. None of you stopped Adolf Hitler rampaging across Europe, or Himmler setting up those camps. Leveling entire nations to the ground. It was Making Germany Great Again, isn’t that the phrase you used? Putting Germany first. Or were you just putting yourself first? We hear the same thing again and again…nobody knew. You knew, you all knew, but you didn’t stop dancing for long enough to trouble yourself with the reality all around you. So how dare you ask me to stop, just because you can’t bear to hear the truth!”
“It’s not the truth. Or not all of it, Dee—”
“You brought this on yourself, Irene. You went out to Berlin in full knowledge of the Nazi regime, and if you didn’t appreciate then what monsters they were, you must have soon enough. You’re not stupid. How could you have been so blind? But you weren’t blind, were you? You knew.”
Cordelia’s face was scarlet with anger. “Time and again I told you. I begged you to leave. I pleaded with you! But all you said was Let’s agree to differ. Don’t let ideology divide us. Well, it’s divided us forever now. It’s divided the entire world.”
“You don’t see…”
“I don’t see! You’re the artist. You’re the one who is supposed to be good at seeing. You were willfully blind, Irene.”
Scalding tears ran unheeded down her cheeks. “You can’t have been unaware. You knew.”
“I was entirely aware. And yes—I knew.”
Cordelia gasped.
“I knew a lot of what was happening. Not about the camps, but certainly I had an idea about many of the atrocities.”
“All the worse, then. What kind of person are you? I thought I knew you, but I didn’t have the faintest idea.”
“Do any of us know each other entirely?” Irene shrugged.
“Why didn’t you speak out? Or at the very least, why didn’t you leave?”
Very quietly, Irene replied, “Because you would never have forgiven me.”
The torrent of words halted, and Cordelia shook her head, eyes sparking with fury.
“I would not have forgiven you? What on earth does that mean?”
Again, Irene was silent. Then she spoke, carefully and softly, as though talking was an enormous physical effort. As though the words were buried so deep she had to haul them up. She shifted to face Cordelia directly, her eyes dark and wide, blue as a bruise.
“I do have something to say. And I intend to tell you all the relevant facts.”
“That’s better. I’m waiting.”
“But not like this. What I have to say is important.”
“Damn right it’s important.”
“We’ll do your report, Cordelia. We’ll fill that out. All my associates. My knowledge of the top ranks. I’m not afraid of going to prison.”
Cordelia pressed her lips together. “That’s out of my control.”
“Because I am guilty.”
Guilty. The word swung in the stale air.
“So you admit it.”
“I’m guilty of not doing enough.” Her voice was low, but it seemed to fill the whole room. “I’ll tell you what I did, Dee, and you can do what you like with it. But there’s something more. It’s private. Not for the report. You can’t even write it down.”
Cordelia was frozen, her fingers on the keys immobile, the typewriter itself blurring in front of her. It was as though the power in the room had shifted. Captor and captive had switched sides. She felt the full force of Irene’s gaze on her, the blazing eyes, the urgent, inscrutable summons, and suddenly she was five years old again, tearstained, stubborn, quieting beneath her sister’s command. The command that had run through her entire life, demanding that she step out of her own world and into another.
“Look at me, Cordelia. Look at me now.”
Chapter Thirty-four
BERLIN, 2016
“You mentioned you wanted more photographs of the city, so I thought you might like to see this.”
Matthias and Juno walked under the Brandenburg Gate and past knots of tourists and people out for a lazy Sunday stroll, up to the Soviet War Memorial. Then they doubled back along the curve of the canal, where the wall once separated East and West, and Matthias pointed to a glass-and-steel construction rising on the banks of the Spree. Its knife-sharp surfaces dazzled with the rippling reflection of the water.
“Our firm designed that. We angled the walls to reflect the canal so the water would merge with and soften the lines of the façade.”
As Juno extracted her camera and began to shoot, he added, “I always like to make new architecture reflect the old. It’s a way of paying homage to the past. Of not forgetting what went before.”
She glanced up, shading her eyes. “Don’t most people want to forget?”
“Here they do. But to understand a city, you must know its history. When Irene used to show me her paintings, she would say an artist must always see what lies beneath. Berlin wears its scars on the outside; you can’t move in this city for memorials and museums reminding us what happened, but there is plenty underneath that is still concealed.”
For a week now, they had seen each other every day. It wasn’t planned that way; it was just what happened. He’d shown her every part of the city he obviously loved, from Wannsee in the west, to Friedrichshain in the east, up to Wedding and Pankow, down to the immigrant districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg. They had strolled through the Kollwitzplatz market in Prenzlauer Berg and browsed the shops and bars around the water tower in Knaackstrasse, where Matthias lived in a refurbished nineteenth-century block. By day they picnicked in the Tiergarten, squinting up at the sun through a blaze of linden blossom, and by night they walked through Potsdamer Platz’s arcing synapses of neon light.
The idea had been that Matthias would show Juno interesting sites to document. So far she had photographed the Olympic Stadium, several of the clear-water lakes, and the old Tempelhof Airport. They had attended a concert in a converted piano factory in Wedding, and eaten falafel and meze in a restaurant in the Turkish quarter of Neukölln. In Wilmersdorf they consumed baklava and thick black coffee at a bar with tables on the pavement, then walked through streets where Matthias pointed out the former homes of Albert Einstein and Christopher Isherwood. They descended the U-Bahn and slid underground to emerge at the Viktoriapark, where they climbed to the top of the hill to see Schinkel’s Prussian war memorial and the waterfall. They passed buildings still pitted with the holes of Russian bullets, as though the battle for Berlin was only just over, and they traced remaining stretches of the wall, crumbling and daubed with graffiti. On the paving in front of some houses they passed Stolpersteine—stumblestones—shiny bronze cobbles that announced the former inhabitants. HERE LIVED IDA GOLDSTEIN, BORN BERLIN 1872, MURDERED THERESIENSTADT 1942. FROM THIS ADDRESS CARL AND HELEN LEBER AND THEIR SONS DAVID AND JULIUS WERE TAKEN TO AUSCHWITZ AND MURDERED IN MAY 1942. JAKOB ABRAHAM, BORN IN BERLIN 1910, DIED IN SACHSENHAUSEN, 1937. To Juno, the whole city, the repurposed buildings, the ruins, and the new constructions, were a vivid palimpsest of what had gone before.
“History seems so alive here. It’s like I can feel centuries under the soles of my feet.”
Matthias laughed. “They say Americans think a hundred years is a long time, whereas Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way.”
They were standing on the roof of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, looking acros
s clusters of cranes pecking at a tapestry of extinctions and resurrections.
“It’s true though,” he acknowledged. “This city evolves so fast, it’s like a time-lapse photo. I go away for a few months and when I return, the skyline is completely changed.”
“Do you mind that?”
“Are you kidding? I’m an architect, remember? Construction is our lifeblood. Besides, Berliners are like you New Yorkers; we embrace change. We know however much we develop, we will never make up for what was destroyed.”
Matthias talked of his childhood growing up in a crumbling Altbau apartment block with his father, who was a printer, and his mother, who was first Irene’s housekeeper, then eventually her nurse. How his devoted parents had worked long hours to ensure their only son achieved a life they had never known. Of his former wife, Ute, now living in Frankfurt, who had left him because she never wanted children, after having discovered what her father had done in Poland during the war.
In turn Juno told him about growing up in Manhattan with her brother, Simon, who moved as soon as he was out of college, first to the West Coast, then to London. Whereas she had stayed close to her mother, trying and failing to mitigate her disappointment in life, all the while discovering a love of photography, and the stories it could tell.
The arrival of Dan, and his departure.
* * *
—
EACH TIME THEY MET Juno worried that they would run out of conversation, or that things would grow awkward between them, yet the moment Matthias’s rumpled figure in its jeans and battered leather jacket materialized, her apprehension melted away. He had a smile that creased his face and ignited his eyes, and his sartorial messiness was a stark contrast to his sleek, angular designs. As they toured his personal landmarks, she noticed how waiters welcomed him like an old friend and how he would greet acquaintances with a clasped handshake, asking after their children and families.
After lunch one day, as they sat drinking coffee in the shady courtyard of the Literaturhaus, a handsome nineteenth-century villa in Fasanenstrasse, Juno felt the urge to explain how she was feeling, but before she could, Matthias said, “I have something to tell you.”