by J. R. Lonie
Around 9am, Friday, 12th December 1941
From the Garonne, the railway twisted and turned as they headed in a northerly direction towards Tarbes. For some distance, the train went so slowly, they might have reached Pau faster had they walked. Both tried to sleep but the anticipation of arrival, even at a rate that would have them there some time in the next year, kept them alert and on edge. The bleak beauty of the hilly countryside below the snowline was quite lost on them. When the train’s wheels ground to yet another halt, both cursed. Henk pulled back the door. They were on a siding, which curved around a gentle slope. From the rumble of a loader up ahead, the locomotive was taking on yet more coal and water. But here they were out of the wind, and when the sun appeared from behind a cloud, it brought some warmth into the car.
Henk removed his coat and under-jacket and then removed his boots and socks to expose his skin to the sun’s rays. He thought of the Lobau, the Social Democratic nature heaven outside Vienna, on the other side of the Danube, lying naked under the sun by the river as free as he could remember, before he was a Jew. It was a place where even Jews and their fat wives could wander naked without comment. The police kept away, unless they were there as good party members in the uniform they were born with, like everyone else. If she wasn’t here, he’d strip down right now.
‘You should do this,’ he said to Eleanor, stretching his feet and toes. ‘Put fresh air and sun on your feet.’ She, who preferred looking at nature while comfortably and fashionably clad rather than being part of it and naked, declined. His kitten joined him in the sun and began washing itself.
‘Is it a he or a she?’ she asked, not having cared less before. Really, she didn’t care now and was just passing the time.
‘I did not know when I get it but now I know he is a she.’
‘It seems a damn strange thing to carry with you in your situation,’ she said.
‘She does not like to live under the Nazis either,’ Henk said. ‘I find her hidden and frightened in Wien Westbahnhof when I start this journey, so tiny, she fits on my hand.’ He smiled, then closed his eyes. ‘She trust me immediately.’
Eleanor picked up his socks, able at last to satisfy her curiosity about the quality of his clothes. Woollen and thick, certainly not standard Wehrmacht issue. Even more interesting, each carried a name tag, an H and a K joined by a V for an aristocratic von. H for Heinrich, yes, but the rest? He with his peasant features? His cat looked more the aristocrat than he. Normally, her curiosity would feed her imagination, for that is what fed the pages of her novels. Now her curiosity had a more prosaic motivation. Forget whom she might conjure up to be HvK. Who the hell was he really? Until she realised with an uncreative thud.
Stolen.
She took the opportunity to reorganise the contents of her rucksack and her valise, swapping worn clothes for fresh, and moving one of the cartons of Chesterfields into her rucksack.
‘What is this?’ Henk said, picking up the copy of The American Woman that she was carrying in her valise to take back home.
He sounded to her like a Puritan preacher in colonial Boston before one of their book burnings. ‘What the title says it is,’ she replied.
‘This is your book,’ he continued in the same manner. ‘Is this not vanity?’
‘Not to read it,’ she said. His impertinence was intolerable.
‘I will read this and tell you if it’s any good,’ he said.
‘I hardly think reading The Communist Manifesto or tales of hero workers qualifies you to judge,’ she said. ‘If you can read at all, that is.’
For the most part, since they’d been forced together, he’d been able to hold his temper. But now?
‘Before all this, the war, everything,’ he said defiantly, springing up and inadvertently dislodging his kitten, ‘I am first in my family to go in the gymnasium. I read Heine and Goethe and Shakespeare, real love stories, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde. Are your stories so good? I do not think so. You and your safe life, what would you know about love?’
He was close enough so the whack she gave his face was loud and hard enough to knock him back. ‘How dare you,’ she said, her anger as cold as the icy wind whistling through the trees outside.
His kitten took fright and leapt out the open door, down onto the track and into the undergrowth. He cried out, pushed Eleanor away and jumped down after it.
‘Katze,’ he called desperately, ‘Katze. Komm, kein Angst, bitte, Katze.’
Eleanor, in her fury, was unmoved. It’s a wonder this hadn’t happened before. It would come back. Even if he was no longer calling it Stalin.
He couldn’t see the cat, but then he heard it calling and saw it under a large bush. Frightened and bewildered, it mewed, and he struggled his hand through to reach it, all the time calling to it, soothing it. He did not hear the locomotive’s whistle, or if he did, he ignored it.
‘We’re leaving,’ Eleanor called out to him from the open door. ‘For God’s sake.’
He ignored her; he kept trying to reach the mewing cat.
The whistle went again, and Eleanor could feel the strain on the boxcar as the locomotive heaved with a tremendous effort to pull the cars forward.
‘Leave it, for God’s sake,’ Eleanor cried as the train lurched forward with the familiar concertina of banging.
At the sound of the clanging of car against car, the cat darted under a prickly holly. The train started to move but Henk would die rather than leave the cat. He called to it and pushed himself in under the bush, scratching his arms, which were still naked from his sunbathing. His bare toes were at least a help in being able to heave himself forward.
‘Hurry!’ Eleanor yelled frantically as he disappeared from her view; she had forgotten her intense dislike. Distraught, she grabbed her rucksack and her valise and was about to leap from the train when she saw him running after the train as he pushed the cat inside his shirt.
Eleanor dumped her things down on the floor, grabbed the rail next to the door and leant out so she might help him. But he was barefoot and though the train was still moving slowly, in moments it would be faster than he.
‘Run, run,’ she yelled, ‘for God’s sake!’ She leant out as far as she could, reaching her arm out full stretch to clasp his hand, pulling him forward enough so that he could grab a metal rung under the car and pull himself up and in.
‘You fool,’ Eleanor shrieked at him. ‘You idiot. That stupid cat,’ she spat.
‘Shut up, stupid woman,’ he snapped as he soothed the cat inside his shirt. He hauled the door shut. His arms were covered in cuts from the holly bush, as were his feet from running along the rocky ground.
Eleanor’s valise carried her first aid kit. She ordered him to sit, wetted a cloth and cleaned the wounds on his hands and arms and on the soles of his feet, soft and torn. Then she dabbed his wounds with iodine, which did not improve his mood. She handed him his socks to put on.
‘Who is HvK?’ she asked.
‘Heinrich von Kleist,’ he snapped, without a beat. ‘German writer and dramatist. You have read The Prince of Homburg, perhaps? Or Michael Kohlhaas?’
She was forced to admire the challenge, his quick if caustic wit, especially in the fraught circumstances.
He reached around his neck. He looked as panicked as when the cat had jumped down onto the tracks. He felt inside his shirt; his eyes scoured the floor of the car. ‘Scheiße, scheiße!’ he cried. ‘Mein Medaillon.’
His locket.
He looked back uselessly to where he’d almost lost his cat. All the low points on this journey, they were mostly physical, moments of danger. Danger he could deal with. But this? A lock of hair? So what! Yet its loss so dispirited him that he who never wept wanted to howl.
‘This is your fault,’ he cried. ‘I blame you. You are the worst thing to happen to me in my life since the Nazis.’ He dropped his face into the crook of his arm in despair.
Yes, it was the cry of a petulant boy, but Eleanor was still cr
ushed by it. She looked around the floor of the car for the lost locket. It was gone. She felt the full burden of the blame with which he had cursed her. Without her, he would not have killed those two soldiers. She turned away and sat in the corner by herself, tending her own wounded psyche as he tended his physical wounds and the loss of the locket, which he used to clutch in his sleep. What had it really held? she wondered, remembering her sneer about the strand of Lenin’s hair. A portrait of his mother? This made her feel even worse.
She wanted to hold him, some tender gesture to make up for it. Instead, they sat in stiff isolation as the next hour or so rolled by, he sleeping or at least keeping his eyes shut. She took out her compact, salve to her hurt, but the moment she looked at her face, she snapped the lid to the mirror tight. She tried to pray but nothing came, so she opened the Psalms at random, as was her practice.
‘The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble,’ she read. ‘The name of the God of Jacob defend thee. Send thee help from the sanctuary.’ How she loved the Psalms; something for every occasion and for every mood. She read on. Then she felt the train slow, and she stood and peered between the loose slats.
Lourdes.
In better circumstances she would have smiled at the medieval magic here, a superior if shallow Episcopalian smile, not too far from the atheist sneers of those raptors from the future whose views and company she so disdained. Her French pals all went to Mass regularly. Claude was devout and Madeleine, particularly devoted to the Virgin Mary, had been to Lourdes twice, once with her mother during her mother’s last illness.
‘The Virgin Mary didn’t cure your mother,’ Eleanor had objected, as much on behalf of her physician father and brothers as from any Episcopalian objection to papist nonsense.
‘No,’ Madeleine had replied patiently. ‘But she gave Mama a happy death.’
As the train crawled along, Eleanor returned to the corner of the car and to the 20th Psalm, in whose words she found further comfort. Words. She was a writer, after all. But really, she knew words alone were not enough, that they did not explain her devotion. When she thought about it, she and those across the Tiber were exactly the same. She couldn’t claim hers was based on experience and reason while theirs was not.
Her family had a summer house at Bar Harbor up in Maine, where she and her siblings had run wild during the long summer holidays. Yet every now and then, more often at dusk, something withdrew Eleanor from the play, and she would find a tree to climb, not to be by herself but to be with whatever it was that kept calling her. She saw nothing, but she felt it and she thought she heard it, not as words but, now and then, like a breeze played on a mysterious musical instrument. The experience was magical and drew her into its gentle cocoon.
That’s how she got her family reputation as a daydreamer. It covered a multitude of sins at school and at home, and even to this day explained her going to France, becoming a writer, even sticking it out after the Nazis came. A prosaic answer for her family to behaviour that was flighty or, in staying after May 1940, simply nuts.
She thought of the house, her family, then and now. ‘You’ll be lonely, old and broke,’ her mother had fretted after she agreed to the divorce from Fred. They were like a curse, her mother’s words. ‘I’ll certainly be old, Mother,’ she’d replied in defiance, ‘but be damned if I’ll be broke.’ She’d omitted to address the most important of her mother’s curses but then she’d been too young. Now, without Claude? She was alone and she was lonely. There were her friends, yes, Sylvia and Madeleine in particular. There were her brothers and sisters, dearly loved, but really, only Will, the youngest, was in any way a soul mate. Also still single, Will, the family darling, turned out to be the family warrior. Couldn’t wait to get into West Point, just like she couldn’t wait to get to France. Each had a calling. But as a young lieutenant colonel in the army, his calling was war and now it had come.
One day at Bar Harbor, away from the others, on the quiet, he said to her, ‘You’re talking to God up the tree.’ He knew. He must have been about seven, she thirteen. He wanted to know what God told her.
‘He doesn’t tell me anything,’ she replied. ‘He doesn’t need to. He’s just there and everywhere. That’s all you ever need to know.’
Will, who usually needed proof – preferably physical – of anything, had nodded his little head. ‘I guess that’s so, Elly,’ he said.
Her eyes filled with tears and she prayed for him. Henk was curled up on the floor, vulnerable and small. She covered him with his coat. He did not stir.
HÔTEL DE FRANCE, PAU, PYRÉNÉES-ATLANTIQUES
9.30am, Friday, 12th December 1941
After their arrival, Bauer quickly reported to the German Armistice Commission, which had taken over the finest hotels along the grand boulevard with spectacular vistas south to the Pyrénées. As with the Loire chateaux, he was not interested in these sights – not for lack of appreciation but because their beauty mocked the plight of his son. They were also the barrier that stood between his quarries and their escape. How close to the city the mountains were quite shocked him. The killer or killers would have to get past him before they reached those mountain passes.
The senior officer, a general, seemed icy at first and preoccupied, but establishing their fellowship on the Russian front during the first war brought an immediate handshake and the offer of a cigarette.
‘Egyptian,’ said the general, who had a pal in the Afrika Korps, ‘captured from the British.’
Bauer added to his esteem in the general’s eyes by mentioning his Afrika Korps son, then they got down to business: the murders, which were news to him. Bauer would have his total support. As the French were interested only in catching smugglers and stopping the exit of recruits for the Free French, he would also immediately order army patrols along the border into Spain in this sector by troops at Orthez, on the other side of the demarcation line, in Occupied France.
‘They’re just sitting on their behinds getting fat,’ he said.
They each smoked another cigarette and reminisced about the first war, forever having to save the Austrian neck on the Eastern Front, Lemberg, Gorlice – names now remembered only by old fellows like them who had been there.
The general told Bauer that diplomatic niceties meant he should report his mission to the German consul in Pau, an ancient Bavarian aristocrat who’d been shunted out of frontline diplomacy by the rise of Ribbentrop. Hitler wanting to treat the French with respect was all very well, but the farce they now had to go through to keep up the pretence that the French were in charge of France was a bureaucratic nightmare.
‘Talk to our man at the consulate. Wolf,’ he suggested. ‘He’s sound.’
GERMAN CONSULATE, PLACE ROYALE, PAU
Mid-morning, Friday, 12th December 1941
The consulate occupied what once had been a grand English club, when les Anglais from Edward VII down had turned Pau into a little England with its own golf club, even a fox hunt, all now much reduced or gone. Bauer and Kopitcke arrived to find it as quiet as a tomb.
‘Maybe they’ve all gone native,’ Bauer whispered, when suddenly, the door was opened to them and they entered what to the eye was still, outwardly at least, an English club. Yes, there was a photograph of Hitler but larger was a portrait of King George V and Queen Mary, another of Wellington and place mats with drawings of Windsor Castle. Bauer wondered if they’d also kept the whisky.
They were led to the consul’s attaché, who to Bauer’s surprise was a young Wehrmacht first lieutenant. But the fellow’s uniform was just too smart and neat for Bauer, and while shaking his and Kopitcke’s hands, the attaché kept his left hand in his pocket, which to Bauer was altogether too casual and disrespectful.
‘Wolf,’ the attaché gave his name.
Despite the general’s recommendation, Bauer and Kopitcke took an instant dislike to this Wolf, reinforced by his lightly accented German – Bavarian or Austrian – which was as upper class as his manners. Too suave and good-
looking for a man, Bauer thought, a typical effete southerner. If this lieutenant had ever been to the front, it was as an aide-de-camp to a backroom general. No wonder he’d weaseled himself into a cushy job here. Wolf absently removed his left hand from his pocket and then, as if embarrassed, immediately and self-consciously tucked it back out of sight.
In that brief movement, Bauer saw a curve in Wolf’s palm where the index, middle and ring fingers had been, making a cruel-looking claw of the remaining thumb on one side and the little finger on the other. Bauer’s face burnt with shame. ‘You’ve seen plenty of action,’ he said in an effort to clear his conscience.
‘Ratschbumm at Smolensk,’ Wolf answered in Landser slang. ‘A Soviet weapon you hear only when it hits you,’ he explained. ‘Not enough to make me useless, but unfortunately, enough to make me useless at the front.’
‘We didn’t have that problem last time over there,’ Bauer said with sympathy. ‘Hearing them coming in was bad enough.’
‘Oh, I think that’s worse,’ Wolf said with a grim smile. ‘What you don’t hear is only a problem if you survive.’ He removed his ruined hand from his pocket now that he had inadvertently exposed it. ‘I wear a glove but it gets in the way.’
Bauer’s embarrassment intensified when Wolf said he had read the report on the murder of the two soldiers. He had also just put down the phone after speaking to the general, who had rung with orders to be passed to the Wehrmacht commander in Orthez to assist. Anything he could do personally, he would do. As for the consul, he added, he of course would also help, but Bauer got the strong impression that help was not what the old man did, and this confirmed his initial impression of the whole consulate. They’d just driven down from Paris, Wolf explained, where they had recently been for consultations, but this had taken it out of the old man.
‘This must be boring after being in action,’ Bauer said.
Wolf agreed but it was better than a staff job in Russia behind the lines with all those arse-licking officers who sent men to die but lived well themselves. ‘I’d rather be back at the front as a cripple,’ he said and his pale skin reddened with anger. ‘I apologise,’ he said immediately, ‘I’m not much of a diplomat.’