by Pam Jenoff
Guilt rises in me as I remember throwing our certificate in the fireplace when I believed Stefan had been killed, watching the corners curl under glowing embers. I hadn’t known. But what kind of unfeeling woman would do such a thing just after learning that her husband had died? I should have kept it, treasuring the fact that we had been connected in such a way—as I had with Georg’s bracelet.
“I—I don’t know where it is,” I lie. “With all of the moving around, it must have become misplaced among my things.”
A look of consternation crosses his face. “Not to worry,” he replies brightly. “We can get a duplicate.”
“But the fire...” Six weeks earlier, rioters had set fire to the Rathaus and many records had been destroyed.
“Then we shall just get a new one. I would love to marry you again. Unless you don’t want...” Suddenly we are talking about something larger than the certificate. “You can go,” he says with difficulty. He is releasing me from the promise of a life together, setting me free. “I would understand.”
In my mind’s eye I can see the door he’s opened and I imagine walking through it, making a life for myself and perhaps even finding Georg on the other side.
But then my vision clears. Stefan’s eyes are inches from mine, the clearest I have seen them since his return. He is quite literally holding his breath, waiting for my response. The door closes quietly with a click. I take his hand reassuringly. “Of course not.”
“I’m going to make you happy,” Stefan says, a note of desperation in his voice. He is squeezing my fingers with more strength than I thought he could muster.
“Shh, don’t be silly, you already do.”
But he shakes his head. “It won’t always be like this.” I sense his helplessness these past months, his awareness on some level that things between us have irreversibly changed. But it isn’t his broken body or spirit that is the problem. It is me.
“Oh, darling.” I reach to embrace him.
There is a ringing at the door then. “That must be my car.” He kisses me lightly, then stands with effort.
Watching him leave, I am filled with sadness. Stefan and I were friends and easy companions once, but without spark or passion. Had I not met Georg, that might have been enough. I might have accepted that romance fades and peaceful coexistence is as much as two people can expect through the years. But now I understand the difference and it makes this stifling and insufferable.
My eyes travel to the photograph of my mother that still sits above the mantelpiece, Papa’s reverence for her unchanged by all that has happened. Her ashes were returned to us from London, placed in the Berlin grave that had been made for her years ago with a small ceremony I had attended reluctantly to support Papa. He had not cried, and I thought perhaps as he joined the rabbi in saying Kaddish with a quiet, raspy voice that he might not take it so badly because he had in fact grieved her years earlier when she left. But later that night I heard him sobbing through the closed door to his room. Though she had been gone for over a decade, my mother’s death was now real. He mourned, too, the loss of his fast-held, improbable dream that she might change her mind and return to us.
There is a shuffling at the door and I look up. Had Stefan forgotten something? But it is the maid, Elsa. “May I?” She slips in and begins to freshen the sheets without speaking. The intrusion of the household staff is just one of the things to which we’ve had to become reaccustomed at the villa.
Not wanting to remain in the apartment with Elsa, I walk down the steps and out the back terrace to the path around the lake. From this vantage point I can see that the dining room has cleared. Papa must have gone to his study, without checking on me as he surely would have in the past. There is a quiet tension between us that is worse than our fight in Paris. Papa had kept the truth about my mother from me. I had lied to him about Georg. How had we gotten to this place?
The good thing—if there is to be one—from our return to Berlin is that I have gotten out from under Ignatz and his threats. I imagine his anger at discovering I have escaped his grasp.
I gaze out across the lake to where swans glide across the surface of the water. My days revolve around walks such as this and visits to the massive library on the first floor with shelves so high a wheeled ladder is needed to reach the upper shelves. I imagine my mother walking this path as I do. The villa is luxurious in every sense of the world, but to a young woman wanting to see the word, the quiet lifestyle, with its rigid expectations of marriage and family, must have seemed stifling. Suddenly it is as if we are one person. The desire to leave—whether it is mine or hers I do not know—looms inside me, larger than ever.
I consider a bicycle ride into town, something to break free of the smothering quiet of the villa. But clouds are beginning to gather to the west and a mist begins to pool over the lake, signaling a strong likelihood of rain. I start back toward the house.
Inside, I pass by Uncle Walter’s office. Hearing several voices, I stop. It is unusual for Uncle Walter, who keeps a strict office schedule, to have business visitors to the villa, much less on a Sunday. Amid the muffled conversation, a foreign accent emerges. Russian, I realize. I shiver, reminded of Ignatz by the strange inflection.
Then I hear another man speaking, German this time, deep and familiar. I freeze.
The voice is unmistakably Georg’s.
Chapter 17
The door to the study begins to open. Panicking, I turn in the opposite direction and run down the hallway, fleeing to the terrace once more. Outside I stop, trembling for several seconds in the now-dense fog. Georg’s voice. It cannot be!
A minute later, the terrace doors creak. “Margot.” Georg, who must have broken abruptly from the gathering, steps from the mist and crosses the patio in long strides. He halts before me, tall and magnificent, the shock on his face mirroring my own. It was not a dream. Our eyes meet and hold.
I freeze, barely able to breathe. What on earth is he doing here? Georg was the last person I’d expected to see again, much less in this house. Excitement and dread and terror and joy rip through me as I drink him in, pulling me in a thousand different directions at once. For a fleeting second, I wonder if he has come for me. But I can tell from his puzzled expression that he is surprised, too. In the hallway behind him there is a gathering of suited men. Georg is here for a meeting. Of course, it makes sense that Uncle Walter in industry and Georg’s family in shipping might have business together.
We stand staring at each other, too surprised for formal greetings. “I didn’t know you were in Berlin,” I offer, suddenly angry. Why hadn’t he told me he was going to be in the city? It would not have been proper for him to contact me; still, the idea that he has been so close by, and that he might have come here and gone again without seeing me, as my mother had in Paris, cuts through me like a knife.
“I returned only a few weeks ago.” His voice is hollow. “I had hoped I might hear some news of you. But seeing you here...” He clears his throat. “It is so much more than I imagined.”
“Oh, Georg!” I want to run to him and fling my arms around him, breathe him in as though this is Paris and nothing has changed. But everything has changed, I remind myself. “We’re staying with Uncle Walter while our house is repaired.” I struggle to keep my voice even.
“You had not mentioned that Walter Rappaport was your uncle.”
“You didn’t ask.” Of course, our last name is Rosenthal so there’s no reason he would have guessed. “We are the lesser Rappaports,” I joke. He does not rise to the humor, but searches my face hungrily.
“I never dreamed...” I watch his face expectantly as he struggles to find the words. He doesn’t hate me. For everything that happened before I left Paris, it is all still there in his eyes, as real as the last night we were together. Something swells up in me, threatening to burst. “That is, to see you again...”
“Margot!” Uncle Walter booms behind us, having seen out his other guests. He claps Georg on the back as
though he is a boy and not a foot taller. “You’ve met my niece.” He uses a voice more affable than the one he usually reserves for me, giving no indication of either our earlier disagreement or the acrimony that is our default state. But behind his smile, his eyes are filled with trepidation. Ever since I was a girl and disrupted one of his dinner parties with a potful of frogs I’d caught in the lake, Uncle Walter has given me wide berth, wary of the havoc I might wreak on his guests.
“Margot and I came to be acquainted in Paris, actually. But I hadn’t realized the relation, or that she was staying here.”
“My brother-in-law’s house is being renovated. I’m afraid the thugs left it uninhabitable.” Georg nods with understanding. Our situation was not unique—wide swaths of Berlin neighborhoods had been destroyed by the war and subsequent rioting. “And since the wedding is to be here in less than a week, it is most convenient that they are staying with me.” I watch Georg’s face. Will the news that Stefan and I are proceeding to get married so soon be a shock? But his face is impassive, no longer vulnerable to such blows.
Papa appears at the terrace door then. “Walter, I...” Seeing Georg standing beside me, he stops. “Captain Richwalder?”
“You also know my brother from Paris,” Uncle Walter says.
Georg nods. “Natürlich. A pleasure, Herr Ambassador.”
“It’s back to professor now,” Uncle Walter corrects, eager to strip Papa of his once-prestigious title.
“No matter,” Papa says mildly, struggling not to convey his displeasure that Georg has once again entered our lives. “So you are working for the government now?”
Georg nods. “In munitions.”
“Really? With the terms of the treaty, I wouldn’t have thought there would be a need.”
“There will be a German military again,” Georg says, a hardness to his voice I have not heard before. “And it will need to be stronger than ever so we can resolidify our interests abroad.”
“That sounds quite different from the role you envisioned when we were in Paris,” Papa observes. “Has your point of view changed?”
“Everything,” Georg says slowly, “has changed.”
Uncle Walter, though, is oblivious to the subtext. “A fine young man,” he says, speaking as if Georg isn’t there. “Smart, hardworking. There’s likely a real future for him in government. Some have even suggested politics.” Georg, a strong and handsome war hero, would make the ideal candidate.
But Georg demurs. “I don’t have the words for politics.” He’s more comfortable with charts and diagrams than speeches.
“It will be a short while until the report we discussed is ready,” Uncle Walter says to Georg, his voice businesslike once more. “Margot, would you mind entertaining the captain while I attend to some other matters?” Not waiting for an answer, he disappears back into the house. Papa hesitates before retreating inside once more.
When we are alone again on the terrace, Georg turns to me. He does not speak, but swallows me in his gaze.
I clasp my hands to resist reaching for him. “You are well?” I manage. The lines in Georg’s face are more deeply etched, giving him a depth that only makes him more handsome.
“As I told your father, I’m working for the government in munitions now.” The answer, focused on his job, is not the one I was seeking. And it surprises me. Georg had said that he hated Berlin and had no time for politics. But something had changed in him since the treaty was signed. “The government is in more dire straits than ever. We need strong leadership if we are to avoid anarchy.” I wait for him to launch into one of his speeches about making a difference in the new world. But that dream died at Versailles. He wears his saber again, I notice. Is it ceremonial or a precaution against the violence and chaos that has swept the city?
“Munitions? But I thought...” My surprise echoes Papa’s. The peace treaty demilitarized Germany, left any notion of a standing army or equipment for one inconceivable. Then I remember the Russian voice in Walter’s study. New allies, allowing us to do on their soil what we cannot do on our own, because there will always be armies and weapons and war. “So you’re staying in Berlin, then?” My stomach tightens, an odd combination of excitement and dread.
“Just for a time. I’ve taken a place at the Grand until I decide what to do next.”
I nod, recognizing the famed boardinghouse with its handful of rooms and stately gardens. Even if Georg intended to stay, permanent housing in the city is in notoriously short supply. But I had not been asking about his job. I want to know if he is all right, how he is managing now that the conference is over and his dreams for cooperation as equals in tatters. “Will you go back to sea?”
He shakes his head. “That’s a younger man’s dream.” There is something different about him. The honor and principles are there, but they have been worn down by political realities, grooves in a piece of driftwood. We are all older now.
“And how was the rest of your time in Paris? I heard the weather became most stifling.” I am babbling now.
He shrugs. “I hadn’t noticed. But I was ready to leave. Nothing was the same after you...that is, after the conference was over.” I blink against the burning in my eyes. He clears his throat. “It’s beautiful here. You must hate it.”
I laugh aloud then, wiping away a lone tear that spills from my right eye. Only Georg, who shares my distaste for formality and pretense, would understand my visceral dislike of our Grunewald villa. “It’s good to see you, Margot.” It is good to see him, too, more so than I might have imagined. “You cut your hair,” he says abruptly.
“Yes.” I pat the sleek bob, bits framing my face. The dampness has drawn my curls tight, making it seem shorter than ever. It is a sharp contrast to the long locks I’d worn in Paris. Georg reaches toward my temple, as if he’s forgotten all that has happened between the last time he had done that and now.
Then his hand stops midair and flounders before retreating to his side. “I like it. It looks more sophisticated.” Neither of us speak for several seconds. “Margot...” Despite his hardness, I can sense the intensity of his feelings for me.
“I’m so sorry, Georg,” I blurt, the words spilling forth. “I never meant to lie to you.” Then I falter. Sorry that I could not tell you about my marriage, because I did not want it to be true, for reality to stand between you and I and all that I wanted for us.
“I should have known,” he laments. “And maybe on some level I did. I assumed that you were standoffish because of the difference in our ages and positions. Still, I never thought...” He never thought that I would have lied to him so. Even now he cannot believe the worst in me and struggles with the truth. “Your friend Krysia came to tell me that you had gone,” he adds.
So she had honored her promise. Of course he had already known, I think, remembering the glimpse of him at the station as our train pulled from Paris. “I wanted to come myself. But I thought you must hate me.”
“Hate you? I could never.” Unconsciously, I reach up and touch his arm. He smiles then, all tension dissipating, and for a moment it is just the two of us, as we always were. “The bracelet.” His eyes grow wide. “You’re wearing it.”
“Always,” I say solemnly. “But you should have it back.” I reach down and undo the clasp.
He shakes his head, refusing to take it. “It gives me great comfort, knowing that some part of me is with you.”
Uncle Walter steps onto the terrace once more and hands Georg a file. “It is good to have you working with us. Would you like to stay for tea?”
Georg’s eyes dart involuntarily in my direction and I can see the conflict that pulls him two ways at once, the inches between us suddenly an ocean. Nothing has changed. Our feelings are as real and strong as in Paris. But with Uncle Walter here and my wedding looming over us, there is simply nowhere for them to go. “That’s very kind of you, but my driver is waiting. I really should return to the city.”
Uncle Walter nods. “I’ll see you out.�
�
“Good day, Margot.”
I watch with disbelief as Georg turns and starts for the door. Don’t go! my mind screams, willing time to stand still so I can hold on to this moment for just a few seconds longer. I want to run after him. But I stand motionless as the terrace door closes. A moment later, I hear the roar of a car engine, the whisking of tires against gravel and dirt.
As the sound fades into the distance, I sink to one of the wrought-iron garden chairs, racked with disappointment. How could he simply go, to walk away so quickly after we had just found each other again? He could have stayed, but he had chosen to leave at the earliest possible moment. Despite his feelings, there was some part of him that had not forgiven me for Paris. And now the moment that I had dreamed of a thousand times but had never thought possible actually had happened. But it was over just as quickly.
I fling open the front door and walk into the house. The driveway is empty, a lingering cloud of dust the only proof anyone had been there at all. Unable to stand the containment of the villa any longer, I walk down the driveway. Picturing Georg’s face in my mind, my cheeks burn beneath hot tears. It is not just the unexpectedness of seeing him again here of all places. No, my feelings for him are all still there, as real as ever. They aren’t going away with time lessening or fading. Desire and pain tear through me.
At the end of the driveway, I retrieve my bike and start to ride, not down the lake path as I customarily do, but toward the main road. I pedal faster now, trying to outrun my thoughts and feelings. But the image of Georg standing on the terrace presses into my mind. I thought my prayers had been answered. I thought he had come for me.
It is not until I reach the station that I realize where I am going. I chain the bike and purchase a ticket and board the train, which soon arrives, largely empty at midday. The worn wooden seating is unchanged from my last ride years ago. A handful of other travelers, spread at respectful distances throughout the car, look straightforward. The conductor comes down the aisle and eyes my ticket but does not ask for it.