by Sarah Blake
“Und—” He leaned to kiss her cheek in farewell, his hand on her waist and then sliding into her pocket. “Stand, and pay, and leave this money on the table,” he whispered, pulling away.
Today she was to meet the S-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse at eleven and simply watch that a man and a woman were not followed.
“And who are the man and the woman?” she had asked.
“You do not know. You should never know.”
She was to wait at the bottom of the stairs and follow the couple holding hands, the woman laughing up into the man’s eyes. Like any couple.
“How will I know it is the right couple?”
“She will stumble on the stairs, and he will hold her tighter so she doesn’t fall.”
It was a play.
Elsa went into the butcher shop first, nodding from the back of the store at Herr Plaut, then to the grocer and the baker. Meat, eggs, potatoes, bread.
Above the street the cathedral tower rose, and the three-quarter bells sounded as they did every hour. As they did every morning at this time, she knew, because she was out every morning, just like this, walking, the basket over her arm. The fear, that was the difference. This is happening. This is no game. You could be hurt. You could be arrested and taken away. For looking wrong. For catching the wrong person’s eye on the train.
If anyone watches you, let them see nothing.
The earlier train hurtled along on the tracks overhead at Friedrichstrasse and the silhouettes of the waiting people on the distant platform burst free and moved like the figures on a music box.
She shifted her basket.
Meat, eggs, potatoes, bread. Now stamps to write letters. The newsstand at the bottom of the U-Bahn station stairs.
“Morgen.” She nodded at Herr Josten.
Distantly, she heard the second train approaching. Ja. Sehr schön, beautiful, she answered Josten, opening her change purse for the coins. The rails above her head hummed.
“Bitte?”
“Your father,” Josten asked. “He is well?”
“Ach ja, danke.” She smiled, handing him the coins.
The train pulled into the station on the tracks above.
She forced herself not to turn and look, to take the three stamps Josten held for her, to slide them into her change purse, to nod and thank him, smiling, just as she did every morning, turning away at last, and glancing up at the train only as one would check a blue sky suddenly crossed by clouds.
A couple descended the U-Bahn stairs hand in hand.
* * *
THE PICNIC MADE a pretty picture upon the lawn beside the circle of roses that ringed the alabaster statue of bare-breasted Venus bending over her flowers, at its center. The stark white uniforms of the Reichswehr punctuated the otherwise indistinguishable men in dark suits, and there were two women in summer hats so wide they floated like birds in the evening air that hung delicious and lingered around them all. Ogden heard Elsa’s laughter like a ribbon on the breeze before he picked her out in the crowd in a yellow dress the color of sunflowers and summer, quick, small, and urgent.
He slowed. For there she was long ago, in the box at the Stadttheater, sitting with her father, her dark head turned away from him that first night, her brown hair piled high. Ogden saw that, and saw the lapis blue velvet drapes in the box, the chipped gold of her chair pressed against the curve of her bare back. And Ogden, practical to his core, but impressionable, and in Europe for the first time, believed in the truth of serendipity. He was twenty-two. Elsa Walser was older, and German. All this flashed through him in the moments before Elsa had turned and seen the awkward American at the back of their box.
“Entschuldigung,” he’d managed. Excuse me.
Her father had introduced them, he had slid into the empty seat beside her, and the three of them faced the stage, where the first violinist had just taken his seat to the left of the conductor, and the hall fell silent. And when the man had touched his bow to the string, touched and then drawn the bow across, holding that long first note, Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one’s life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.
And the memory of Elsa opening the door to him at Linienstrasse 32 the next morning flooded up as it did each time he saw her after an absence. If there are places that hold us, keeping us in them, surely too there are people, he felt, people who work like mirrors for the selves we have forgotten. The young Ogden stood on the stoop below Elsa Walser that day, stock-still, stuck and dumbstruck, staring back at the woman in the doorway, unsure whether to look or look away. In that instant, he imagined himself in love with her.
“Ach,” Elsa had teased him. “The American. But he does not move.”
The Mouse, she was nicknamed by the circle of friends she brought him into, though Elsa was not shy or retiring, not mousy at all. “I am”—she leaned over and tapped his shoulder at the end of a long late table littered with ashtrays and napkins—“how do you say? Undercover.” And smiled.
“Milton!” Elsa called now, catching sight of him, her eyes resting on him even as she continued speaking to the woman beside her.
He waved.
And as he walked forward into her gaze, the gap between what he’d imagined and what was the truth appeared as it always did whenever they met. At first, he was a figure of curiosity to her, and then, fairly quickly, a figure of gentle fun: a man of property, an old man at twenty-two she teased. She had marked him as an American through and through—appealing and fundamentally uninteresting. She had married Gerhard Hoffman, the man on the stage that night Ogden first saw her, the principal violin for the Berliner Philharmonie, a genius. And like her father, she had married a Jew. Now they had a little boy. Ogden could never have been the man she needed. He would have always fallen just shy, just short. Though short of what, and why, still continued to elude him, and—if he were honest—to irritate, albeit softly, like a hole worn into his sock. He knew himself to be more than what she saw.
“Here is Milton,” Elsa explained in her perfect, accented English as he arrived. “We pretend we do not know his Christian name.”
The heavy German r tolled beneath her words. He leaned to kiss her on both cheeks, smelling the lilac in her hair.
“Ach, so?” One of the women in the little group around Elsa extended her hand from beneath her hat, ready to smile, unsure of her own English.
“I do have a name, as it happens,” he replied cheerfully. “The Walsers refuse to speak it.”
“My father likes to claim he’s had a Milton at his table.” Elsa had turned from him. “He is a great reader of Paradises Lost.”
“One,” Ogden retorted mildly, “is enough, I should think.”
She smiled back at him, resting her hand on the soldier standing beside her, so inordinately proud of his uniform it seemed he would not bend for fear of creasing it.
“Private Müller—” she introduced him, and the man’s arm shot up in the air with the greeting Ogden still found impossible to take seriously, but was everywhere, even here in the open air of a spring evening in the park. He had heard from Bill Moffat at the embassy that there had been American tourists beaten for not responding with the required gusto.
“And Colonel Rutzbahr,” she continued, pointing to another man who had wandered into their group, this one genial, bowing, fluid. The stiff and the smooth—Ogden held his smile in check—a perfectly German pair.
“Heil Hitler!” He nodded, turning back to Elsa. “Where is your husband tonight?”
“He will be along,” Elsa answered. “He had to meet someone.”
“Ach, always the Someones for Gerhard Hoffman.” Colonel Rudi Pützgraff appeared beside Elsa with a champagne bottle and glasses.
At her husband’s name on the man’s lips, a light shut off in Elsa’s face as if a hand pulled closed a door at the end of a hall.
“Our national treasure,” the colonel said as he pressed a
glass into Ogden’s hand, “is kept quite busy.”
Ogden nodded his thanks.
“It is good to see you here, Herr Milton,” Pützgraff remarked, tucking the champagne bottle under one arm and reaching for his cigarette case. “I gather you are to be congratulated.”
“Am I?”
“American money and Nazi industry.” Pützgraff offered the cigarettes. “You and Herr Walser.”
Elsa slid one of the cigarettes free.
“German industry.” Ogden shook his head at the case.
“But they are the same,” Pützgraff replied. “Natürlich.”
Ogden didn’t answer.
“Your husband will play the Wagner on the twenty-fourth?” Pützgraff asked Elsa, leaning toward her cigarette with his lighter. She drew in the flame.
“Of course.” Elsa exhaled, her eyes on him. “That is the program.”
Pützgraff straightened. “He does not like Wagner?”
Elsa turned her smile up to him. “But I said no such thing, Colonel.”
Ogden glanced at her. She was holding herself at attention, like a sentry in a box.
“Prost.” He raised his glass to draw the man’s gaze.
“Prost!” Pützgraff tipped his glass toward him and moved away.
The golden light caught on the lower branches of the lindens across the park, softening at the edges. Two rowboats on the lake raced across the flat, darkening water. In the growing dusk, the brilliant white statues glowed in a line beneath the trees. One of the uniforms and Elsa’s friend, the hatted woman, wandered together slowly toward another fountain.
Dropping to the blanket on the ground, Elsa patted the spot beside her for Ogden to sit as well.
“Where is Willy?” he asked, lowering himself down.
“At home.” Her face softened. “In bed.”
“Poor fellow. My boys hate to be put to bed before sunset.”
“Ah, but sunset lasts much longer here.”
It was true. Even now, verging on nine in the evening, there was little sense of the end of the day. Twilight hovered in the grass and in the crushed petals of the roses, but the sky above stretched a sweet and endless blue.
Pützgraff strolled round the group with the champagne, dropping into conversations and moving along. Ogden was aware of Elsa beside him watching the man as well. A little farther along the pathway, he caught sight of her father deep in conversation with a German economist who had trained in Wisconsin. Beside them stood the director of the Reichsbank, an old friend of Walser’s and, to Ogden’s mind, a reasonable man. Ogden raised his hand in greeting; Walser nodded and held up his glass.
“You have signed the papers,” Elsa said quietly. “That is good. That will be good for Father.”
He glanced at her. She was looking past where her father stood now, talking to the economist.
“Have you traveled outside the city on this trip?” she asked.
“No.”
She nodded and inhaled.
“Take a bicycle ride in any direction, on nearly any road, and you will see it all—plain as day.”
“What will I see?”
“Training fields, airstrips, Brownshirts in the woods. We are all Nazis now.”
“Elsa—”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Believe that all Nazis are the same?” He shook his head. “There are too many good men, too many with too much to lose to let the thugs rule.”
“But which is which?” She turned to him. “How can you tell? How can any of us tell?”
He held her gaze.
“It started so slowly, Milton. Coming toward us like a river shifting from its banks, one centimeter at a time. One lie, then the next. Lies so big there had to be a reason to tell them, there had to be some purpose, maybe even some truth—Goebbels is not an unintelligent man—”
She spoke without seeming to care if he heard, thinking aloud in the dusk. “Perhaps a communist truly did set off the fire in the Reichstag, though it made little sense. Perhaps there was a reason so many people were arrested that night, in Berlin alone. Perhaps there was a danger no one could see yet.” Her voice caught. “But now has come the slow awakening—this will not pass. This will not stop.”
She looked at him. “But it must be stopped.”
She was admirable, Ogden felt, but untempered. Too quick to jump to dangerous conclusions.
“Elsa—”
“They are beginning another phase,” she said quietly. “Gerhard is certain they will demand he step down by the end of this year. They are talking of passing ‘laws.’”
“But he is first chair.” Ogden frowned. “He is one of the primary draws of the Philharmonie.”
She flicked her cigarette into the grass before them.
“There are thousands of jobs for the taking now. Jobs that belonged to Jews, even Jews like Gerhard. Thousands. So it is Christmas morning here in Germany,” she said, shaking her head, “and here is Papa Deutschland. Papa with the Christmas goose, Papa with presents—
“And no one asks Where did the presents come from, Papa? Whose tree did you rob? Because Papa hasn’t robbed anyone. Only Jews. Those jobs—those houses—those belonged to Germans all along. And all Papa needs to do is join the Party. Then it is Christmas morning, everywhere. That’s all.”
He masked his impatience. “The Nazis are nothing but thugs. It cannot last.”
“Milton.” She shook her head and turned away. “You are not listening.”
“I am listening very hard.”
“We have been … purloined,” she said. “In plain sight.”
He cast a brief, considering gaze at her.
“Frau Hoffman! Herr Milton! Meine Freunde,” Colonel Pützgraff called. “Ein Foto! Kommen Sie hierher. On the blanket, there—” He pointed to where Elsa and Ogden sat. Good-naturedly, the others began to move toward the blanket as Pützgraff busied himself.
“We need you,” Elsa said to him swift and low beside him.
“We?”
“Gerhard.” She nodded. “The others.”
“Elsa—” he protested. “What can I do?”
“Ach.” She turned her face from him. “Still the man with the courage of his conventions.”
Ogden pulled away from her, pricked.
“Closer.” Pützgraff frowned playfully. “Much closer.”
Ogden drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.
“You should not condescend, Elsa.” He stared straight into Pützgraff’s camera. “It does not become you.”
“Eins, zwei—” the colonel counted.
“Become me?” A thick, unhappy laugh burst from Elsa in the moment the flash went off.
“Sehr gut!” Pützgraff raised his fist in satisfaction.
* * *
KITTY HAD CROSSED out of Central Park at Seventy-second Street and was walking steadily east toward the river. It had been a lovely afternoon. The Philharmonic had played the Mendelssohn, and Kitty and her mother had run into Mrs. William Phipps and then, unexpectedly, into the Wilmerdings. She had put her mother in a cab and decided to walk the rest of the way home. She stopped on the corner to wait for the light.
Across the street, protected by its green awning and polished brass railings, stood One Sutton Place, one of the many unremarkable granite squares on the Upper East Side whose address did all the work, as nothing about its unadorned face suggested the wealth inside. This had been entirely purposeful. When the building went up in 1887, there was a general sense among its first occupants (all of whose apartments commanded corner views of the East River) that the thick-shouldered, rather showy mansions of arrivistes such as Frick and Rockefeller on Madison and Fifth did not bear repeating.
And certainly had not been repeated here, Kitty mused, delighted by the old building, stolid as an uncle. Delighted by it all. By everything. By the light. By the day. She raised her eyes and counted up fourteen stories to where the windows of their apartment stretched.
E
ven now—seven years after Ogden had bent without a word and picked her up in his arms on the day they arrived back home from their wedding trip, carrying her, wrinkled traveling suit and all, straight toward the double brass doors out front, straight over the threshold and to the elevator, where he leaned her against the satin-covered wall waiting for the elevator to open, and kissed her—even now, she had the short, sharp sensation sometimes here, on the street outside where they lived, that she was playing at house. She had tripped along the pathway set down for her life, footsteps light on the flagstones—there went Kitty Milton, arms full of flowers for the front hall, there again at lunch, and again later beside her husband, her arm snugged under his elbow, the three children born every two years in perfect, healthy succession, proof if anyone was ticking off the boxes (as she knew they were; she had grown up beneath the myriad eyes of dowagers and gossips who occupied the stiff-backed chairs in front rooms and back gardens between East Twelfth and East Twenty-eighth streets) that Kitty Houghton had gotten it right.
When she had vowed to love, honor, and obey, she’d never have guessed how easy Ogden would make it. Or how much she would want to. How she wanted what he wanted. She moved through the world with a natural reserve. The longing to speak out, crack open, start up suddenly did not run in her. Cool, calm, observant, she knew it was these very things that had drawn Og to her. And yet, when he had come to her on their wedding night and slid his hand down her bare arm, her body rose under him as if another girl had lain there coiled and waiting. She shivered now with the memory.
And the thought of the children in their baths up there, the drinks set out on the bar in case anyone dropped in, the single place setting at the long table ready for her dinner, the bed turned down at the end of the evening and the curtains drawn, gave her a happy jolt. Her rooms were full. She was not playing at all.
The light changed and she stepped off the curb and toward two little girls walking toward her in their crisp dresses, faces forward, holding on to either side of the pram in which a new baby lay. “Up you go,” the nanny breathed, raising the front wheels to take the curb. Wordless, the little girls climbed up onto the curb, still holding on to the pram as on to the straps of a rope tow.