The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  “But what is our game?” I asked.

  “Your game is to find out if she’s your sister—let me worry about the rest of it.”

  By morning Munich had turned white. The snow was dry and fine. When I went outside the wind sprayed it on my face like old memories of anticipation and beautiful women. Skaters with their scarves unfurling behind them slid noiselessly through the snow, carving their paths on the ice of the small lake. The English Garden was eerie, quiet, sound hugged to the earth by the layers of snow. I was early, stood watching the figures gliding with their hands clasped behind their backs, tried to take Peterson’s advice and play my role as the innocent American searching for a possible connection. Pretending Cyril and Paula and Dolldorf and Campbell and Keepnews were not dead at all but going about their business as usual. It was like being a man with normal sight trying to give the impression of blindness and it was confusing.

  The serenity of the park swept across the lake, lapped at my failing nerves, soothed me. If only I could have strolled without reflection into the swirling whiteness, across a tiny arched bridge and into sheer nothingness—then, at that moment, I’d have sighed and gone without a good-bye. Looking back at it, I suspect that I was very far gone in those moments: I was alone, it was quiet and cold, there was no one trying to kill me, the world was as white as an abstract painting, an enormous canvas into which I could step and slowly watch myself dissolve as if I were in two places at once. I felt the way I remembered John Garfield had been in a movie I saw as a kid at the little theater in Cooper’s Falls. He was sitting at the bar on a steamship sailing on an endless sea and Faye Emerson told him he was okay but he was a washed-up newspaperman who drank too much. He was bitter and he was tired out and he didn’t know it but he was already dead, everybody on the ship was dead. John and Faye and Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker and Edmund Gwenn—they were all dead and they didn’t know it and I was thinking about that movie, remembering that it had been called Between Two Worlds and Cyril and I had been taken to see it by our grandfather and one of his guards. Eleanor Parker knew she was dead, she and dapper Paul figured it out, and they asked the steward, Edmund Gwenn, where they were sailing and he said, why, you’re sailing for heaven … and for hell, too, because it was all the same place in the end. It was almost thirty years later and I was sure I hadn’t thought about that long voyage out, with our popcorn and our Dr Pepper, in all that time, but I was thinking about it when I saw Lee standing on the little humped bridge, the outline of her blurred through the snow, and she was watching me. …

  Then she came down the bridge and around the gentle curve of the lake toward me, purposeful but not hurrying, she was just walking toward me through the snow and I couldn’t move. There was snow in her hair and her hands were jammed down into the pockets of her leather coat. She was wearing dark brown corduroy pants and her long legs ate up the distance between us until she was standing in front of me, smiling at me levelly, gray eyes straight and for a moment it was there, she looked exactly like my father’s portrait of my mother; she was looking at me and past me at the same time, as if you could never have quite all of her attention.

  Her voice was businesslike, faintly clipped and British. “I’ve been watching you, wondering what to do—I’ve been nervous about seeing you.” She turned to me, slid her arm through mine, and shoved her hand back into her pocket, locking me against her and heading off around the lake path. “I’m Lise Brendel … or at least I am until you can prove I’m someone else.” She stuck the tip of her tongue between her lips, caught a snowflake. She wasn’t smiling when I looked.

  “I can’t prove anything,” I said. “I have no evidence. Nothing. Intuition, hope, curiosity … but I am a little short of proof.”

  “So was your brother.”

  “You look like our mother.” A man in a red jacket sat down abruptly on the ice, looking about to see if anyone had been witness to his fall.

  “Yes, he told me that, and a good deal more. He told me about your little sister and the Blitz and that the body of the little girl was never found.” She kicked at a tiny snowbank, pulling on my arm. The tension was easing away.

  “I do quite want to know who I am. I try to treat this with a certain amount of bravado, I tried it with your brother and he wore me down … and I suppose you’re the same way, aren’t you?” She pushed on, said: “What were you thinking about when I first saw you? Me? Were you thinking about me?”

  “No, I was thinking about a movie I saw with my brother Cyril when we were children … a fantasy. A bunch of people on a ship, they didn’t know they were dead but finally Judgment Day comes and they have to answer to Sydney Greenstreet.”

  Arm in arm we walked through the snow.

  “Paul Henreid comes back to life in the end. So does Eleanor Parker.”

  “Not an easy trick,” she said, somber, eyes ahead.

  “Love conquers all.”

  “I rather doubt that.”

  “Well, you should see more movies.”

  We walked a path leading out of the park, across the street, with snow to our ankles. Down a few narrow, snowy steps from the sidewalk there was a small coffee shop. A rotund woman with gray braids and a red nose welcomed us effusively; the place smelled of baking sweetcakes and fruit warming and strong coffee. Lise was obviously at home there.

  I helped her out of the tight-fitting leather coat: it creaked in my hand. She moved to a table by a window which faced into a tiny patch of garden which ended some ten feet away with a brick wall rising six feet to the sidewalk. The garden was slowly filling with snow; huge flakes fluttered past our window. A fire leaped in the grate. From upstairs came the sound of a piano, elaborating on “Laura.” I was Paul Henried and she was Hedy Lamarr and outside there was a continent in flames, the Nazis reached for the world.

  “You like the music?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s the proprietress’ son. He’s blind and plays in a jazz club I sometimes go to.”

  “With Siegfried?”

  Irritation flared like a signal in the night.

  “Yes, with Siegfried.”

  She took a Camel out of a crushed pack and lit it with a paper match. Her tiny bag matched her coat. She leaned her elbows on the table, narrowing her square shoulders; the tight, ribbed sweater made her seem terribly thin, tiny-breasted and boyish. She wore no jewelry, all very plain, and her gray cat’s eyes were large and luminous. Her cheekbones were high and prominent, the mouth wide, the cold light reflected from the snow took the color from her cheeks and hollowed them out, gave her a gaunt cast. “Is there really much point in going on about my social life? I am very fond of my husband and Siegfried is a close friend. Doctor Roeschler is a kind of father. I lead a very quiet, very circumscribed life. I teach my ballet class, I consult with the children’s mothers, I read books, try to keep my English up, try to understand why there isn’t more to life. I wonder what other people’s lives are like, what gives them meaning, what draws them on from day to day. …” She regarded me coolly. “I am not a very interesting person, I’m afraid, Mr. Cooper. I’m not even sexually responsive … I’m alive. I think I could be interesting perhaps—if only I knew the trick. I’m sure there’s some sort of trick to it. Perhaps, if I’m someone else—” There was no hint of a smile, just the tight-lipped, cool voice. “Then maybe I would find myself interesting. I don’t know. So, if I am your sister, that’s all I amount to. A neurotic, not very happy, exceedingly bourgeois woman on the wrong side of thirty.”

  The strudel smelled of hot raisins and apple and cinnamon, caramel melted across expanses of nut buns.

  Lise poured coffee, added cream and sugar in large quantities without consulting me, severed a large chunk of bun, spread it with butter, and ate it, leaving a dusting of crumbs on her protruding lower lip. “Good,” she said, licking the tip of a finger. “Go ahead, it’s bad for you,” and she smiled. “Most German women get fat asses and arms in time from just this sort of eati
ng.” She took another bite. “Want to avoid that if possible. Not easy.” She sipped coffee, leaving a faint mustache of foamy cream. The blind boy switched to “You and the Night and the Music” and a gust of wind blew snow in a flurry against the window.

  “Tell me about my brother,” I said, “how he behaved. …”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Well, you know him. He came to me with the story straight out, saw that it disturbed me, saw that I was unsure of my own lineage and he kept pushing at me about it. He was making inquiries around Munich, stirring certain people up, newspapermen and city records officials. I was sorry that Gunter was upset because that meant he’d see to it that your brother left town. And I liked your brother—he had freckles. Your brother and I shared a sense of what was funny—he once said that what was funniest was what just missed being tragic.” She chewed on the bun, stared out the window for a moment as if remembering something. “I liked that. He said that wherever I actually came from my soul dwelled in the Black Forest. I thought he was rather poetic.”

  Wind whistled in the little garden. The piano had slid into “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and I was trying to envision this version of Cyril.

  “Did my brother ever mention your husband’s political involvement?”

  She smiled, almost chuckled. “The Nazi thing, you mean? Roeschler again, wasn’t it? Well, that’s something which struck us, Cyril and me, I mean, as rather funny—you know, just short of tragic. I’m aware of some of the friends my husband has, some of the games he plays with his friends … but it’s impossible to take seriously, isn’t it?”

  “But did my brother express an interest?”

  “All right, yes, he mentioned it. Look, he was curious about me. Me. Not my husband. Not Nazis. There was no political overtones.”

  “Did he meet with your husband?”

  “At his office.”

  “And?”

  “My husband was irritable, annoyed. He wanted your brother out of our lives.”

  “Did he threaten my brother?”

  “My husband doesn’t threaten people, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Look,” I said, working up to my maximum wounded-sincerity level. “Look, I’m not myself—stop eating for a minute, for God’s sake, and please listen to me. I’m not here as a troublemaker, please believe that—I’m overwrought, I admit it. But I have a hell of a reason.” Her interest was with me now, a handful of bun had come to a halt halfway between plate and mouth.

  “Yes? What reason is that, Mr. Cooper?”

  “When my brother left you here in Munich he didn’t think the Nazi thing was a joke. He thought it was serious enough to follow it all the way to Buenos Aires. And he had your picture with him all the time.” Her eyes were fixed on mine. “And I never did get to talk to him about you, about anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when he got back home somebody murdered him, Lise—and I don’t think it would have happened if he’d never found you. I think you are the reason my brother is dead.” I stared her down.

  “You are really quite cruel, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Not as cruel as someone was to my brother.”

  She swallowed hard, sniffed.

  “How could I have known—”

  “That’s what I want to know—did you know? Does anybody here know? I’ll tell you, you’re goddamn right, somebody here knows—either your husband knows … or that blond dreamboat Siegfried knows—”

  “You’ve met Siegfried?” She jerked her breath back like an escaping mistake.

  “I saw him with you in London. I followed you—I watched you—”

  “You are ridiculous!”

  “My brother is dead. A bunch of other people have died and I am a lot of things but I’m not ridiculous. I’m frightened. I’m tired. I’m incredibly angry. … And my voice is shaking.”

  She reached across the table and pressed my hand flat against the cloth.

  “Your hand is shaking, too, Mr. Cooper.” Her grip was strong, veins stood out on the back of her hand. The tiny breasts brushed the edge of the table, a muscle jumped in her cheek. My performance was over and reality was getting at me like an old war wound, throbbing in the memory. “Are you all right?”

  “Look, either we can talk or we can’t. You’ve no obligation to me, but I do. Do you understand that, do you understand what’s going on here?”

  “No, I don’t understand,” she said softly. She released her hold on my hand. “But I’ll try to help you.”

  “Tell me the absolute truth about what happened with my brother.”

  “There is no such thing,” she said quietly. But she tried.

  Later, when she left me by the pagoda in the English Park, I stood in the snow watching her walk away, alone, straight, purposeful, growing dim behind the snow, and then I walked back again around the lake.

  She said she’d told me all she knew. I think I trusted her but what I felt for her was so confused, so blurred by my curiosity about our possible relationship—now I could add to it a purely personal reaction: I was fascinated by her, by the circuitous ramblings of her mind, her egocentrism, her appetite for pastry, her hopelessness about her own life, her tiny breasts and her cool gray eyes, by the transparent way she seemed to be measuring her own heft in this peculiar situation. Her first concern, or so it seemed to me, was for herself, and yet, knowing that, I could believe that I might sacrifice myself for her. She offered little and the response to her own aura of selfishness was to make allowances, give her more. I didn’t know if I wanted her to be my little sister Lee, after all.

  The story she related with that solemn, unsmiling determination was this:

  Brendel had been taken off guard by Cyril’s arrival and subsequent determination. And Cyril’s digging had done far more than annoy him: she admitted she had never seen her husband so obviously upset and concerned. Cyril had quickly mapped out the relationship between Lise and Siegfried Hauptmann, confronted her with it—but primarily in terms of the political conflict between the two men, the old Nazi trying to head off and yet engage the support of the new. She insisted that fanciful splinter-group politics were of no interest to her or to anyone else with any sense. Cyril had doggedly insisted that she had no conception of the depth of their involvement.

  Brendel made clear to her that she was not to see him again under any circumstances. Intuitively, she felt that Cyril was in danger. She took protective action.

  Running a substantial risk, she arranged to meet him by the pagoda in the English Park after one of her ballet classes. Naturally she had turned to Roeschler to help save the situation and it was decided that Cyril would go to ground immediately, disappear before any harm could befall him. It was, she insisted, a strong intuition on her part, though she could hardly associate her husband with anything so violent, so unpleasant.

  She had to bet that Roeschler was more her friend than her husband’s; it was a chance but again her instincts guided her. Cyril spent two nights at Roeschler’s flat and made his exit by automobile through the Alps on the third day. Then he was gone and her husband and Siegfried had never discussed him again.

  Having told me that version, Lise had stopped with a perplexed air. “So, I admit I am not pleased with my husband’s political hobbies. And I am not at all taken by Siegfried’s playing at being a Nazi—but really what difference does it all make? Why is it all so important? Who could possibly care? And why would my husband care if it turned out that I were in fact someone else? It’s me he loves, whoever I am. Don’t you see that? Doesn’t anyone understand that? Me. It’s me he married, not a name on paper. …”

  But, of course, that was the point.

  “Let’s say, purely for the sake of argument,” I’d said, “that there is some doubt about your real identity—let’s say you’re not Lise von Schaumberg at all. Then, Cyril’s inquires would have had some real relevance to your husband. If you are who you appear to be, why would Brendel have been driven so far—so far
that you felt you had to arrange a hideaway for my brother?

  “But what if there is something to hide, something they didn’t want Cyril to know, what would it be? Why would they be so disturbed?

  “I can only work my way round to one conclusion: that Cyril was right. Not just about the Nazi thing—from what I can tell that could be effectively denied, nobody in Germany wants to hear depressing things like that—but about who you are. Your real identity somehow frightens them.”

  She shook her head, not so much in disagreement, but slowly, as if in amazement. Absentmindedly, she stirred her coffee, rattling the spoon in the cup.

  “You tell me, Lise”—I pressed her—“give me a better interpretation. Why else would they really care so much who you are? And why would Cyril go home to find his murderer after he’d gone so far to find you?” And why, I might have asked, would one of the men who tried to kill me turn up following me in Glasgow and London and wind up dead in a toilet? I had a hell of a lot of evidence, enough for me, connecting Brendel to the mess—but how could I explain it to her? And all of my evidence, which could convince me of so much, really couldn’t convince me that Lise was Lee … only that Cyril thought she was.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You confuse me, you’re so certain of so much. I believed my husband, why wouldn’t I? Now … I don’t know.” She lit another Camel.

  “Politics, the movement,” I insisted, and she seemed to flinch, shrink back. “What do they really value? You? Do you believe they value you so much?”

  She shrugged faintly.

  “Finding out that you were someone else, that surely wouldn’t make you leave your husband. If he was worried about that. All right—then what else is it that they value?” I paused like a schoolboy debater clinching his point. “They value their political involvement whether you think it’s a joke or not. It’s no joke to them. We know your husband is a Nazi—a real Nazi working beneath the surface of society. And it’s that movement, that conspiracy which he values.”