The Words I Never Wrote

by Jane Thynne

  “You know, Miss Lambert, when you get old time goes so fast, you forget most things. But some memories snag…You live them over and over. It was like that the night the Russians came.”

  Juno remained silent, fearful of distracting him.

  “All the SS knew what they had coming once the Russians got to them—the Ivans weren’t inclined to put anyone on trial. It would be a bullet through the back of the head if they were lucky. So Irene decided to hide the Nazi with me. We were standing all night. Half standing, half crouching, pressed up against each other. There was no room to move, not with two of us. At dawn we heard the Reds at the door, crashing around, breaking stuff, firing questions, you know? And then a different thing, a monstrous sound…”

  His voice faded.

  “We could hear her…it was impossible not to. It was unbearable to hear, but what could we do? If either of us attempted to help it meant certain death.”

  “Yet you did,” Juno prompted.

  The old man gazed at her, bemused. “Not me. Hoffman. He went to save her.”

  “You mean he got there before you could?”

  Blum’s lips twitched. Once again he shook his head.

  “No. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t hold him back. They dragged me out, and when I showed them my star they couldn’t believe it. The head Russki, who had a bit of German, kept saying, ‘Nichts Juden, Juden kaput!’ Bastards thought all the Jews had been exterminated.”

  “So you explained Irene had been sheltering you.”

  Oskar paused. It was impossible to determine what had tired him more, the walk or the sheer exertion of memory. She had to strain to hear his next words.

  “It’s hard for you to understand, a young woman like you, with…all this.”

  He gave a cursory nod to encompass the tranquil scenery—office workers with headphones, mothers pushing strollers, a pair of skateboarding kids miraculously avoiding a tracksuited jogger.

  “It was insanity. The Russians were screaming, threatening, asking me what I was doing with a Nazi. Guns going off. There was no time to explain anything.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t tell them Irene had sheltered you?”

  He was silent.

  “But the penalty for hiding Jews was death! Irene risked everything for you. Why not make sure they treated her fairly?”

  For a moment the old man’s filmy eyes remained unfocused, fixed on the past. The only sign of emotion came from the veiny hand twisting and plucking the material of his trousers. Then he turned his gaze back to her.

  “You want the truth?” he rasped.

  “Of course! That’s why I’m here.”

  “The truth is…I was a coward. The Russians were the victors. They had taken Irene. I assumed she had been killed, or soon would be, so what was the point? I didn’t want to make a fuss by taking sides with some Nazi’s widow. They might want to know how I’d met her—they might discover I’d painted for the family. I was young, remember. The young are selfish like that. I wanted to live. I felt guilt, of course, every survivor did, but I kept schtum. The only exceptional thing about me was my talent, and that deserved a future.”

  “Didn’t Irene deserve a future too?” Juno heard herself say, her voice shaking with emotion.

  A bony shrug. “Most of us are cowards, big or small.”

  Juno sat stunned, struggling to process her conflicting emotions. Shock, at the thought that Oskar had sent his protector to an almost certain death, and recognition that what he said was true.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? And as you see, I got my future. I forgot the past. At least until the day Irene’s sister turned up.”

  “You met Cordelia. Where? When?”

  “It was 1980. I was having a small exhibition in a gallery on Canal Street. It was just a boring party—a couple of people standing around slurping white wine and not buying my paintings—until this woman walked through the door. Even though I’d never seen her in my life, I knew at once who she was. It was the eyes.”

  Those same eyes, direct and challenging, that had stared at Juno from a hundred byline pictures.

  “A painter doesn’t forget that kind of blue. And mein Gott, I saw her sister in her. Irene had always talked so much about Cordelia. Cordelia this and Cordelia that. Cordelia the journalist, Cordelia with her life in Paris, and how much she missed her. Now there the woman was, standing right in front of me.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to tell me that Irene was dead. She thought I would like to know, as we had been acquainted in Berlin. And it meant she was free to mention something she had promised not to tell while her sister was alive.”

  He paused for a greedy drag of his cigarette.

  “After the first rape, it got worse. Irene was raped, not just once, but repeatedly. She was passed from one group of Ivans to another until the British rescued her. Happened to hundreds of thousands of women.”

  “That’s…”

  “Terrible, ja. It was the worst kind of revenge the bastard Ivans could think of for the Germans. To ravage a whole nation of women. The tragedy was that Irene found herself in the same position as plenty of others. Pregnant.”

  He spat the word out without sympathy.

  “Poor Irene! But I never heard about a child. Did she lose the baby?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “As Cordelia was talking, we were interrupted. A dealer was at my side, wanting to speak to me. That wasn’t happening too often at that stage in my career. Fact was, it was a miracle I was having an exhibition at all. So I turned away to do business. And when I looked back, she’d vanished. I never saw her again.”

  Juno could not contain her frustration. How could Oskar have been so incurious? So casual about the woman who had once held his life in her hands?

  “What do you mean ‘vanished’? Why on earth didn’t you call her? You both lived in the same city. You could easily have tracked her down.”

  Oskar shifted evasively, and appeared to study a flock of starlings, wheeling and diving in the milky sky.

  “How hard would it be to find a well-known journalist?” Juno persisted fiercely.

  “Ach, she didn’t want to be found! And I didn’t want to find her. The truth is, I sensed something in Cordelia I recognized in myself.”

  He inhaled, prompting a lengthy bout of coughing. Juno waited in a torment of impatience.

  Then softly, he said, “We both, her sister and I, in our different ways, betrayed Irene.”

  The coughing had wearied him. The eyes veiled over again, and grasping the arm of the bench, he creaked effortfully to his feet. Juno realized that the conversation was at an end. Still, she couldn’t bear to let him go.

  “Please,” she said, more sharply than she intended. “Don’t leave. I have so much more to ask—”

  “I’m sure you do, my dear, inquisitive Miss Lambert. But I have nothing more to say.”

  “What about the SS man? Hoffman. Did he survive?”

  Oskar gave a dry laugh.

  “At least that brute got what he deserved. By jumping out of that shelter he threw away any chance he had. The Ivans dragged him into the garden and shot him between the eyes, right in front of the honeysuckle wall.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  BERLIN, JANUARY 1946

  The world was in tumult. Even in the formerly upmarket Wannsee, streams of foreign laborers—French, Italian, Belgian, and Dutch—trudged the streets with handcarts and trolleys piled high, heading west and south to their homes. In the opposite direction came veterans, many of them on crutches, missing legs, or arms, or eyes.

  Cold and hunger were the enemies now. Winter had the city in its jaws like a savage animal, windows were nailed up with plasterboard, and everything from fencing to par
k benches had been stolen for firewood. The ruined buildings were haunted by feral children scavenging for food, and gangs of men who operated the black market. Any kind of luxury was out of reach. A tin of coffee cost two hundred marks, a carton of cigarettes five hundred.

  Yet, for Irene, the outside world increasingly receded as she turned inward, toward the change that was taking place inside her. To start with, it was only a butterfly flutter, but as the months wore on she grew accustomed to it twisting and revolving, testing the limits of its liquid world. She adored the kick of its limbs as it explored its silent sea, at first swimming, then merely squirming in the constricted space. From the seventh month on the skin of her belly was stretched so tight that each nudge and elbow was visible. The constant wriggles and ripples made her laugh. It was as though she was about to give birth to a puppy rather than a child. Her breasts grew swollen and full veined, and she was glad, because there was no milk to spare in Berlin and she would need to feed the child herself.

  Standing in the garden, listening to the birds in the trees above, she was filled with an intense curiosity. All babies were mysteries; you never knew what nose or build or temperament they would possess, and in theory this one should be even more mysterious because its paternity was uncertain, yet as time progressed any doubts she had fell away. For whenever she played the gramophone, willing the music to pass through the walls of her womb, her baby would dance in delight.

  Then, in the depths of winter, four weeks before she expected, the pain began.

  At first she assumed the cramps were no different from the ones she had felt for months, little arrows that darted, almost pleasurably, across her belly and deep into her womb. The child was barely shifting now, engaged so low that she could feel its head pressing on her bladder and was aware of it whenever she walked.

  At one point she had imagined she would deliver the baby at a local nursing hospital, but when she visited the place and saw the enormous ward of laboring women, she shuddered. The place was full to capacity and every woman there was bearing a child of rape. The atmosphere of hope and delight that normally flourished among new mothers was replaced with grim desolation, and supplies were so short that newborns were wrapped in newspaper instead of blankets.

  Irene resolved to manage at home. She had seen plenty of women give birth in the hospital and had a fair idea of the process. To help, she had contacted Nurse Beckmann. The old woman had readily agreed to move in the following week to be on hand when the baby arrived.

  As the pains intensified in the late afternoon, Irene walked through the drawing room and library, and into the kitchen, the only warm place in the house, where she bent over the stove, clutching the rail as her contractions built and then crested while the child butted its head against the knotted fist of her cervix. The pain helped to allay her panic. How was she to reach Nurse Beckmann? There was no chance the old woman had a telephone, and she lived on the other side of the city in Friedrichshain. Why had she not foreseen that this child might be premature? How was she still so deluded as to imagine her life’s path would, just this once, run smoothly?

  * * *

  —

  “WE’LL NEED TOWELS, HOT water, and safety pins.”

  “Safety pins?”

  “Yes. Where are they?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Irene had spent three hours in labor by the time Cordelia arrived, bringing a bag of apples and two ounces of cheese wrapped in waxed paper. Hearing low moans of pain issuing from the kitchen, she dropped the bag and dashed in to find her sister pacing, a thick volume lying open on the table.

  “Why safety pins, for God’s sake?” gasped Irene.

  “That’s what it says here.”

  Irene had barely picked up The National Socialist Woman at Home since her mother-in-law presented her with it on her arrival in Germany. While the bulk of the book concerned cleaning tips, housework, and multiple ways of pleasing husbands with herring and cabbage, one chapter was devoted to the subject of married love and childbirth. In true Nazi style, guidance for the arrival of a baby read like the instruction manual for a new cooker.

  “A guide to conception,” Cordelia began.

  “Skip that. I know it already. Just read the part about labor.”

  Cordelia flicked through the pages clumsily. Irene realized her sister was more nervous than she was, yet she was too focused on her travails to pay any attention.

  “The pains are spaced widely apart to begin with, then become closer together. When they are coming at an interval of three minutes, the doctor should attend the laboring mother.”

  Irene managed a hollow laugh. “There are no doctors.”

  “But there’s a nurse coming. You said you knew a nurse?”

  “I was a nurse, remember? We’ll manage, Dee.”

  “You mean it’s just us?” Cordelia failed to conceal her alarm.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Let’s get you into bed then. I’ve lit a fire.”

  “Do you…have you anything for the pain?”

  They both knew the answer. There were no sedatives available. And even if there had been, no one in Berlin was wasting precious medication on a process as natural as childbirth.

  “I’ve got some aspirin. But maybe we should save it for a bit later.”

  “Give it to me now.”

  “And there’s brandy.”

  “Good. That too.”

  Irene lumbered slowly up the stairs, stopping periodically to sag against the banister, and then into the bedroom, where Cordelia’s fire had taken the edge off the icy air. Moving around, she tried to get comfortable as repeated waves of pain juddered through her. The best position was to kneel and brace herself against the side of the bed, biting into the counterpane as each contraction crested and died away.

  * * *

  —

  NEVER HAD CORDELIA FELT so impotent. It was said women didn’t remember the agony of childbirth, but how could anyone forget a pain this intense and animalistic? Irene’s face was unrecognizable—white and contorted, with the veins standing out on her neck as though she was a runner flinging back her head at the finishing tape. Cordelia couldn’t imagine what it felt like. When she reached out a soothing hand, Irene brushed it away fiercely.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Cordelia had never heard her sister so furious. Helplessly she gathered towels and arranged them on the bed. She was terrified that the child would get stuck and die, and then Irene would die too. Their mother had given birth to both of them at home but with the family doctor in attendance, and probably a midwife too, not to mention a heavy dose of sedative.

  Summoning an air of authority, she mixed the aspirins with the brandy in a glass.

  “Drink this. Then try to lie on the bed.”

  Awkwardly, she raised Irene up and positioned her.

  “To think I used to like my narrow hips…”

  “You’ll be fine,” Cordelia assured her, with a confidence she didn’t feel.

  A short while after, something changed in the pains that racked Irene’s thin body. Throwing her head back, she braced herself against the bedhead, teeth clenched and her entire attention focused on the pain that was seizing and engulfing her in ever-increasing waves. She began to breathe more rapidly, almost panting, her brow pouring sweat. Then suddenly there was a gush of blood and water and, looking down, Cordelia saw a startling flash of dark hair.

  “Oh, Irene, I think it’s coming.”

  Her sister gave one more guttural groan and the child slithered out, covered in blood and slime, followed by a thick whitish rope that Cordelia realized was the umbilical cord.

  “Cut the cord,” her sister told her. “Then ensure the afterbirth comes.”

  Cordelia had already sterilized the scissors in boiling water. She cut the cord as instructed and
picked up the newborn. It weighed hardly anything; no more than a rabbit. The tiny body was grayish, with a splatter of ink black hair, and the waxy skin was as creased as an old man’s. It lay inert in her arms, without sound or movement.

  The child is dead.

  That was her first, panicky, thought. She jiggled the lifeless bundle of flesh gently, to no avail. Looking down at the bloodied baby, Cordelia realized she must move it away from Irene, who shouldn’t see, and do everything she could to revive it, or if that was not possible, then remove the corpse, to save Irene greater distress.

  Yet even as she entered the icy hallway, cradling it gingerly, the shock of frigid air produced a thin, wailing bleat and blood rushed to the infant’s face. At once, its complexion bloomed pink, and indigo eyes opened and locked on her own.

  Irene’s child was alive! Cordelia was filled with an inexpressible exhilaration. Out of all the agony had come this perfect, unblemished scrap of living flesh.

  A fresh start untethered to the past.

  She reentered the bedroom and went over to the bed. “Here. It’s a boy.”

  She rested the child on Irene, who looked down, brushed her fingertips across his cheek, and smiled.

  “He’s beautiful.”

  Then, shutting her eyes in exhaustion, she fell back against the pillow.

  “Take him, Dee, could you? Look after him for a little while?”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  BERLIN, 2016

  The Hotel Adlon was a paradise of velvet sofas, orchids, onyx, limestone, and blond wood. Murmured chatter in a clutch of European languages mingled with the chink of expensive porcelain, and at the center of the lobby a Murano glass chandelier spilled soft golden light onto a fountain of bronze elephants that, according to the placard, was a gift from a 1930s maharaja. The Adlon was precisely the kind of staging post readers of American Traveler would appreciate in their European odyssey. Indeed Odysseus himself could probably not have resisted it.