by Pam Jenoff
“I was thinking of dinner in the city on Saturday, you, me and Celia,” he says, changing the subject. There is a moment of uncomfortable silence between us. While I appreciate his need for her companionship, I have always resisted his attempts to bring Tante Celia closer into our circle. The last thing I want to do right now is sit down at a formal meal with the two of them. But he has conceded to my continuing work with Georg. And seeing the hope in his eyes, I cannot refuse. I smile. “Certainly, Papa.”
Our conversation over, I walk to my room and change into my nightgown. Brushing my hair, I go to the window. It is raining now, thick round drops slapping against the window. My gaze travels down the street toward the hotel. I’d wanted to check on Georg, but the late hour, on top of Papa’s forbidding me to go there, had stopped me. I undress and climb into bed, then lie awake in the darkness.
My thoughts roll back unexpectedly to the day Mother died. I came home from school that afternoon like any other. We’d been painting with watercolors and I’d done a scene of our garden I thought my mother might enjoy for her study. That the house was quiet was nothing new—she was often in her own quarters, napping or reading. I made myself a snack of cheese and crackers like I’d been taught, started on my homework. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty.
Finally the door to the kitchen opened but it was Papa who stepped through. This was not unusual, either—he sometimes worked in his home study. But his sleeves were rolled up and his hair disheveled in a way I never saw unless I caught him on the way to the water closet in the middle of the night. “Mama’s gone,” he said in a hoarse whisper and I thought he meant to the market or tea with a friend, though she had none of whom I knew. Seeing the faint red half circles around his lower eyelids like makeup in a play, I understood then that he meant dead. He had always tried to shield me from the worst, then as well as now.
A noise at the window pulls me from my memories. I push back the covers and as I walk to it, puzzled, the sound comes again, a pebble grazing the glass.
Georg stands on the pavement below, head tilted upward, face illuminated in the moonlight. “What are you doing here?” He does not answer. My stomach gives a little skip. But his standing on the street beneath my window is sure to attract attention. Suddenly I am mindful of my nightgown. “Can you wait a moment? I will be right down.”
Quickly I dress and walk through the apartment to the front door. “Is someone here?” Papa calls from his desk.
Unable to bear the questions the truth would bring, I pretend not to hear him. Downstairs, I open the door. “Hello, Margot,” Georg says, as though it were perfectly normal for us to meet like this. His eyes reflect like dark pools.
“Are you mad? You should be in bed.” Behind him, raindrops lingering from the storm that has just ended fall from the eaves, the dripping sound rhythmic.
He shrugs. “I’m better now.” I want to protest that he cannot possibly have recovered so quickly. His color is restored, though, and his face clear but for the faint half circles beneath his eyes. It is as if he has shrugged off serious illness like a bothersome cloak.
I’ve missed him, I realize, as a faint hint of his aftershave drifts beneath my nose. The past two nights apart have seemed so much longer. Then, remembering the missing document, I am flooded with panic. Perhaps he has noticed and that is why he is here.
“When you didn’t come...” He falters. “I was worried.”
I slump with relief, then hope he has not noticed. “I sent word.” My note had only indicated I’d be gone the previous night, though, not tonight, as well. “I meant to return the papers today. I can get them right now if you need them.”
“It isn’t that. Rather, I wanted to know why you had not come.”
Tante Celia appears behind him unexpectedly in the doorway. “Oh!” she says, mouth agape at the sight of the tall, handsome officer. I stare at her, equally surprised. Though I’ve long been aware of her slipping into the apartment to see Papa, this is the first time we’ve encountered each other at such a late hour of the night, when there is no respectable explanation for her appearance.
“Excuse me,” Georg says, moving aside to let her in.
Celia steps around him, forgetting to leave her wet parasol outside. Then she turns to me. “Margot?” We stare at each other awkwardly.
“Tante Celia, may I introduce Captain Georg Richwalder? Georg, this is my...” I hesitate, considering a more explicit introduction, then decide against it. “This is my aunt.”
He shifts his hat to his left arm and extends his right, kissing Tante Celia’s hand as though we are at a ball and not the front door at a wholly improper hour of the night. “A pleasure.”
Her eyes travel from him to me and there is a moment of interminable silence, broken only by the drops falling from her umbrella to the marble floor. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she says slowly. She could tell Georg about my engagement to Stefan. I hold my breath, waiting for the next drop to fall.
Upstairs Papa coughs. “I should go,” she says, walking past us.
“I shouldn’t be here unannounced at this hour,” Georg frets when she has gone. “Only I saw these...” I notice then his hat is full of flowers, still wet from the storm. “Honeysuckle. You mentioned you like it and these are the first I’ve seen of the season. They’ve just begun to blossom,” he adds, his eyes hopeful as a child’s.
I step out of the apartment building and close the door behind me, then I reach for the flowers. They are a pretext, of course, an excuse to come and see me. At the bottom of the hat, my hand closes around something cool and metal. The flowers are held together by a finely linked bracelet of pearl, wrapped around the stems. “Oh, Georg. I couldn’t possibly accept this.”
“It’s just a small token of my gratitude for your work, and for your kindness while I was ill. It was my mother’s.” He takes the bracelet from the flowers and fastens it around my wrist. “She believed that such things were to be worn, not shut away in a drawer from the light.”
I open my mouth to protest. Such an elaborate gift isn’t proper—I don’t know him well enough. And it must hold a great deal of sentimental value for him, if he cared enough to bring it along with him to France. But the bracelet seems to forge to my skin as if a part of me and I cannot refuse it. He lifts my wrist to adjust the clasp. “What’s this?” Illuminated in the glow of the streetlight is the scratch, red and swollen, from where Ignatz had grabbed me in threat. I am seized with the urge to tell Georg the truth about everything. There is a calm confidence about his demeanor that makes me want to trust him and I know he could fix this. But I cannot.
“I scraped myself earlier,” I lie, cringing at the need to meet his concern with deception. Does he believe my explanation? Eager to distract him, I pull out a strand of honeysuckle from the bunch, inhaling the warm, fresh scent. Then I put the sprig in my hair, which is undone, combed long and full around my shoulders. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”
He nods formally, then takes his hat and turns to go. Behind him fireflies blink in the darkness.
“Wait.” Setting the flowers on the table inside the doorway, I step out onto the street. The damp pavement releases its smells of earth and stone and waste.
He turns back, eyes hopeful. “Would you like to take a walk?”
“You shouldn’t be walking anywhere in your condition.”
“Nonsense. Come.” I follow him down the dimly lit street. The air is more summer than spring now, any hint of a chill gone. Crickets chirp unseen and water trickles down the gutter along the roadside. “I love to walk at night,” he adds.
I nod. I’ve often felt the pull from my open window to stroll the deserted streets and hear all of the noises so buried in the chaos of the day. I haven’t done it, of course; for me alone, it wouldn’t be safe. But walking beside Georg, I feel somehow protected. We pass a church and I peer up at figures carved in stone that stare down piously, demanding our repentance. The streets hold their breath, as if at any mo
ment someone might step out and apprehend us.
We reach the park at the end of the street, the pavement fading into a dirt path that runs along a stream. Georg offers his arm and I hesitate. Then I reach out and wrap my hand around his thick forearm, the material of his uniform scratchy under my fingertips, skin warm beneath. We walk in silence for several minutes. The stream grows wider until it opens into a small lake with untended banks, flush with high curved reeds.
“Look.” He points upward. I follow his hand, amazed at the bed of stars that unfurls above us. On the streets, the lights and tall buildings make it hard to see the sky properly. But in the shrouded darkness of the park nothing stands between us and them save a gentle canopy of branches and leaves. “Orion’s Belt. The stars can be a kind of navigation tool when you are at sea. We have more modern equipment, of course, but in past centuries sailors navigated the world by the stars. As long as I could find Orion’s Belt, I wasn’t lost. The stars helped center me.” There is a kind of hollowness to his voice, as though longing for such a centering now.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t come to you these past two nights.” I do not elaborate on my argument with Papa, knowing his misgivings would be hurtful to Georg. “I hope I haven’t set you back too far in your work.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. I thought you were angry or upset.” His voice trails off. He was concerned that I was put off by the things he said the other night. Despite his delirium, he remembers, and that makes his words real and impossible to deny. “You can stop working for me. The position I’ve put you in is untenable.” My breath catches. Does he know somehow about Ignatz and the missing document, after all? For a moment, it is as if I am transparent, exposed. “I would understand if you didn’t want to upset your father.” I relax slightly. It is Papa’s concerns he’s picked up on intuitively. But I hate how that makes me sound like a child.
I consider what he has said. It had not occurred to me to stop working for him. I could even ask Papa to let me return to Berlin. It would solve many problems—Papa would no longer be angry and Ignatz, if he believed my termination involuntary, would have to accept that I could no longer help. But it would feel like giving up. And seeing Georg every day is the last thing I want to forgo.
No, I do not want to leave him. “Not at all,” I say finally. “I won’t give up on what we are doing.”
His shoulders drop perceptibly with relief. “Good. I wanted to see you, too, because I have exciting news.”
“Oh?”
“I received a new file from Berlin, one that had been lost in the archives—or so they thought. It belonged to a diplomat called Leimer, who had so many ideas similar to ours about how the German ground forces could partner with the West in peacetime. But then Germany signed the alliance with Russia and it was all moot. Leimer killed himself in protest.”
“How awful!”
“Indeed, but his notes may have some suggestions about how to combine the strengths of the two militaries that could be most helpful by analogy for our work.”
“Have you gone through it yet?”
He shakes his head. “The file is massive and it only came late today.” Yet he had broken from working on it to come find me. “I thought that perhaps if we divided it, we could get through it more quickly. Of course, the documents are already in German, but I thought that if we worked together it might go faster.” Though, there was no need for translation, Georg was taking me into his confidence with the materials, treating me as his partner.
I think of the document I’d taken for Ignatz, seemingly disappeared. I do not know where it has gone, the extent of harm it might do in the wrong hands. Georg has not noticed it is missing, at least not yet. I look at him helplessly. I want to tell him everything. But I would have to admit what I had done and then he would despise me. And what could he do? Best to say nothing.
I shiver. Georg starts to remove his coat. I wave him off. “I’m not cold, thank you.” My voice comes out more harshly than I intended. We are at a precipice, a place where one more step will make return impossible. I cannot bear to have him closer to me—even if it is only his coat.
“Oh...” He falters. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, mistaking my reticence for offense. Suddenly we are talking about something much larger than a coat. “If I said or did something...” He thinks I’m angry. The truth is just the opposite—it is my feelings and attraction to him that made me push him away.
Unable to bear the notion that I have hurt him, I reach out and touch his arm. “It’s not that.” Our eyes meet.
“Margot...” He lowers his head and suddenly his lips are lightly on mine, a question. I hesitate for a faint breath and then I am kissing him back, harder, swept away by things I had not dared to imagine. His hand cups my cheek. His mouth tastes of the sea and sand and faraway harbors, of longing and loneliness and loss, a wave pulling back from the shore, threatening to drag me along with it. Stefan has kissed me before but it was nothing like this....
Stefan. His face appears in my mind. I put my hand on Georg’s chest, then pull away. “I can’t.” I struggle to catch my breath and right the world that wobbles around me. My cheeks burn. This is wrong. What kind of horrible woman am I, kissing another man while my husband lies wounded in a hospital bed? Georg’s embrace holds everything I have ever needed, though I had not known until this very moment it existed. But it doesn’t matter—I made a promise that I will honor. “I can’t,” I repeat.
His face crumbles. “I mistook your intentions and I apologize.”
I reach for him. “Not at all. It’s just that things are very complicated right now.”
He pulls his arm from my grasp and steps away. “You needn’t worry,” he says. His voice is as stiff and formal as the day we met, all traces of the familiarity and closeness we’ve built up since then. “I understand now. You don’t regard me in that way. It doesn’t matter if it is about position or religion or something else. I accept it, and I won’t bother you about it again....”
No, I want to shout. I have never cared about those societal things and the notion that I do not like him, well, nothing could be further from the truth. But his logic makes sense—we are two young people and both, he thinks, single. There is no reason we could not be together if we chose. He smiles ruefully. “I should thank you. It has been a useful reminder of why I do not dabble in affairs of the heart.” He turns abruptly. “I should see you home.”
“Georg, wait...” I do not want to leave or to let go of this moment, the most real of my life. But he has already started from the water, back toward the garden path. I reach for him again. Suddenly the ground shifts beneath me. The bank. I’ve gone too close to the edge and the earth, softened by the recent rains, begins to give way. I fall backward as if in slow motion, my hands reaching toward Georg and closing around emptiness.
I sail through the air for what feels like several seconds before crashing into the water, icy as it engulfs me, seeping through my clothes. I flail my arms and try to kick, but my legs become tangled amid my skirt. The water begins to close over my head.
Georg is beside me then, pulling me to the surface, one arm around my neck and the other my waist as he guides me to shore. “Are you all right?”
“Quite.” I tremble, as much from my terror at encountering the water as from the night air, frigid against my wet skin. “I told you I wasn’t much of a swimmer.”
He laughs as we reach the bank. “That’s an understatement. The water is hardly deeper than you are tall, though panic can make things seem much worse.” Then his expression grows serious. “You’re soaked,” he says, apparently heedless that he is wet, as well. He wraps me in his coat and this time I do not protest. “We need to get you back to the hotel.”
I stand, holding my soaked skirt aloft so as not to trip. “I’m fine.” But I am unable to stop my teeth from chattering. “I’ll just head home.”
“Come back to the hotel and while your things are drying out, I can show you the Lei
mer file.”
“Fine,” I relent, my curiosity about the new documents piqued. It would be better, too, to avoid seeing Papa and Celia like this and facing their questions.
Ten minutes later, we reach the hotel and he leads me up the back stairs to avoid the lobby. Inside, I wait uncertainly in his sitting room until he reappears, producing a soft, gray dressing gown. “Put this on.” I walk to the water closet and come out a few minutes later, his oversize robe swimming around me. He takes my dress from me and hangs it by the fire he’s started. “This should dry in no time.”
He looks toward the desk, piled high with his papers, and I expect him to pull out the file. But instead he hands me a cup of tea. “Sit.” I hesitate. Talking to him in such a state is ridiculously awkward and improper. But there is something strangely delicious about being swallowed by his oversize robe, the familiar smell of his aftershave wafting up from the collar. I wanted to come here tonight, I realize, and it had nothing to do with the new documents or avoiding Papa. I draw my knees up close beneath me as he adds wood to the fire.
He stands and walks into the bedroom once more, then returns a moment later with a small tube. “Let me see your wrist,” he says firmly, kneeling in front of me. He squeezes some salve from the tube and rubs it into the wound where Ignatz had grabbed me, the warm pleasure of his touch mixing with dull pain, stirring something deep inside me.
Finally, he sits across from me, then stares into the fire, not speaking. Is he thinking about our kiss, or the fact that I pushed him away? I stop, flooded by regret, feeling Georg’s lips so full on mine. The kiss was like nothing I have ever experienced. Live for the moment, Krysia would have admonished. It was all any of us had anymore. But I had turned away, letting as ever all of my self-doubts ruin the kiss. Surely there would not be another.
I notice for the first time the sword that is on the mantelpiece. A shiver runs through me. “They permitted us to keep our weapons,” he says. “I do not, of course, carry mine here.”
“Have you ever used your sword?”