by Paul Griner
“You have a German radio,” Bertram said, picking up the topmost sheet from a thin file as if reading it, though he seemed to already know its contents. Claus’s time in prison would have been in there, his deportation from America.
He was about to object but Bertram held up a hand. “You do only because we told you to. Is that it?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to take it.”
“No,” Bertram said. “But it’s good that you did. It might keep you out of prison.”
Claus didn’t respond and Bertram said, “Helping us wouldn’t be bad. You may not like us, but we’re not rounding up Jews and herding them away.”
“Just Germans. Or anyone who has German blood. Which is going to get tricky.”
“How so?”
“Soon the royal family will be in trouble.”
Sitting beneath his portrait of the king, Bertram ignored the jab. Instead he leaned forward and slid a telegram over the desk. “The Germans, yes. Look at what they’re doing.” It was from Charles Bernstein, a German American Hollywood producer from the ’teens. Claus had worked with him on Intolerance. In the telegram he asked for money to help flee Germany, the nine dollars needed to process his passport application. He sounded not just desperate but afraid.
Claus studied the back of its yellowed form, as if more might be written there. “And what’s happened to him since?”
Bertram shrugged. “I wish I knew. But he’s a Jew, so I can imagine.” He shut the file and stood. “And I can tell you that if you don’t help us you’re likely to spend the war—however long it lasts—in some kind of confinement. Brixton, perhaps.”
“Where Jews are also being murdered.”
“A few.”
“A few? And is that acceptable?”
In the end Claus asked for a week to decide; Bertram gave him one day. He left certain he wouldn’t return. He didn’t trust Bertram, and Bertram certainly didn’t trust him; working for Bertram would be an endless series of compromises, at the end of which he was likely to be cast aside. If jail was still being offered, better to choose it than to give Bertram that power, which he seemed likely to flourish at the slightest provocation. There was something moist about him.
But when he’d gotten back to his apartment, he’d found his landlord moving his things out onto the street.
The landlord’s wife had been apologetic. “I’m sorry, Mr. Murphy,” she’d said, “but my ‘usband wouldn’t ‘ave you. Part German and all.”
Her red-faced husband, with his brick-shaped head, stood at the top of the stairs, arms crossed over his narrow chest, refusing to discuss it. From behind Claus came murmuring and he turned to see a small crowd and a man in a morning suit walking off with a side table.
“But that’s mine!” he said, and tried to go after him.
“Not no more,” a heavyset member of the crowd said, and along with the thin pimply youth beside him made his shoulders rigid so Claus couldn’t get through without having to knock them down. He’d had a vision of himself in prison, enduring an endless series of such tests, and knew he couldn’t face it. Ashamed of his own cravenness, he’d gone back to Bertram, who’d found him the apartment in Charing Cross and arranged for Claus to become a warden; the work would make him less suspicious to others and allow him greater access to sources.
Then in May of 1940, after the Germans invaded France, Bertram had arranged his position at the MOI, working on films. Exciting, initially. His first script concerned the Home Guard, a short film meant to prepare them for the likely German invasion, and it was a real joy to tinker with the writing, to fix others’ words so they weren’t wooden, so the part-time soldiers faced believable dilemmas; a boy appears in the town crossroads, bloody and mute, the Home Guard gathers around him. Who wouldn’t? But might it not be a ruse, allowing the Germans to sneak past those guarding the post office and capture the center of another town? It had been a thrill to be part of it again.
And further work for the MOI meant that he got to blunder about the countryside, scouting locations for films. On each trip he picked up bits of information for the Germans, sent on by coded letters, first to his cousin Robert, then to an Abwehr handler. Less often, he transmitted by radio. The English were seeking out forbidden transmitters and he had to keep his broadcasts short, vary their timing; it wouldn’t do to be caught by his own side.
That entire first summer his information was mostly about English readiness, which he’d been instructed to magnify. His version of the Home Guard was more fully staffed and better equipped than the real one, drilling with modern rifles rather than mops, though he was careful to add that this was only in certain areas he could be sure about; others might not be the same. The Germans, foolishly quick to believe him, instructed him to develop agents in other parts of Britain so that all of their reports would be so accurate, and he’d complied, making up most of his contacts. A matron in a Brighton naval hospital, who, like him, had German ancestry; a disaffected Irish supply sergeant billeted in Edinburgh; though there were a few, like Winifred, who were based on real people.
Bertram had encouraged him. “Mus uni non fidit antro,” he said, and Claus, instinctively certain that he shouldn’t reveal everything about his past, hadn’t let on that he knew Latin.
“No knowledge of Latin?” Bertram had said. “More’s the pity. An American education. ‘A mouse does not rely on just one hole.’ Apt, you see.”
That July, all his earlier doubts about working with Bertram had returned when the Arandora Star sank. It had been filled with German refugees, many of them interned with Claus at Brixton or Kempton Park, who’d been judged for various reasons to be enemies of the state. Single men, mostly; but for the accident of a Nazi cousin and his gift of a radio, Claus would probably have been on the ship himself. Bound for Canada, and overloaded with 2,500 refugees, it had been sunk by a U-boat seventy-five miles off the coast of Ireland.
“That, yes,” Bertram had said, pushing aside the paper Claus laid on his desk. “Accidents of war.”
“An accident?” Most of the people Claus had been interned with had been scared, a few angry, nearly all had despised Hitler, had given up everything to flee to England for precisely that reason; it was intolerable that Bertram should be so dismissive. He couldn’t help recalling the suicides, their gray, cold bodies—he’d been detailed to cut several of them down—and he grew so angry even his shins tensed. “It wasn’t an accident, it was sheer stupidity, and if you’re going to be that bloody callous about it, I’d prefer to resign.”
“Don’t be stupid, man,” Bertram said. “That would put you on the next ship.”
Claus didn’t doubt he meant it. He’d continued to work, though admittedly with less enthusiasm, telling himself that the war would soon end, or that his role in it would, that he needed to hang on only a while longer. Over time, keeping track of all of the imaginary spies and their jobs and the information they’d passed on had grown overwhelming, especially as D-day approached and he’d worked desperately to fool the Germans into believing that he’d discovered where the landings would take place: Calais. Bertram had given him freedom on that.
Where do you think they’re likely to land?
Calais.
Tell them. You’ll be doing what you should, making an educated guess.
Bertram must have known the truth. Claus had been the perfect decoy, believing his own misinformation.
As if their conversation had never stopped, Kate rolled over and said drowsily, “Tell me about prison. What it was like.”
He found it easier to discuss in the dark, the images that sprang to mind, like the beginning of a film. “Radio earphones were attached to our beds, we played baseball and basketball. We didn’t go to our cells directly from work.”
“Work?”
“Sewing, that was my first job. Or a kind of sewing. And on Sundays, we were out of the cellblocks all day—in the yard, reading in the library, or in winter playing dominoes or chess in the old hospita
l. We had movies twice a week.”
She lit a cigarette. “It doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t,” he said. “Not all of it.”
But it was hard to explain. His uniform with the wide striped pants and jacket; the blue cloth shirt and cap and the square on it, red, blue, or black depending on the number of infractions he’d committed that week; the petty rules that were ridiculously easy to break, often unintentionally—if his top button was unbuttoned, if he forgot to return his fork separate from his tray, if he wrote a third letter in a span of seven days. And the dispiriting food, cold because he had to walk from the steam tables where it was served outside and across the yard to the dining area, rain, sunshine, or snow, the cockroaches he picked out with one hand while he ate, the phenomenal heat of the nights since the ventilation for their entire block was controlled by a single prisoner, Beasley, short and short-legged and with tattooed fingers, who had an irrational fear of breezes; the joy he’d first taken in the Thursday-night scrub-downs since it was a break in the routine until that, too, became part of the deadening sameness. And the emotional cost of his endless fury at the injustice of being imprisoned for making what he was convinced was a patriotic film, it was best not to discuss that; he always felt as though he was whining.
Absently, she ran her hand over the Spirit of ’76 tattoo. “So why did you get it?”
“Youthful bravado. To show that I didn’t repent. And I don’t. But now I prefer to think of it as a reminder of another prisoner. William Simon. He’s the one that did it, a jailhouse artist.”
“And what happened to him?”
“Tuberculosis. He’d been in a local jail in Oklahoma and the sheriff didn’t want to pay his medical bills. One day a gust of wind blew over an oil lamp in his cell, starting a fire, so the sheriff charged him with malicious destruction and shipped him out to die in the federal prison, as a way to save money. Your government at work for you.”
“And yet here you are, making films for one.”
“Just so. Perhaps you shouldn’t trust me.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t” She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette, drank from a glass of water by the bed. “Not this early, at least. That requires hope, which I’ve found to be a rather expensive commodity. I prefer endurance.”
“Like the German Jews,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. Not like them. They won’t be left even that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I could see what they were in for, even when I was last there in ’36. In any case, perhaps that’s why I’m where I am now. The choices were obvious.”
“Stark, rather. They were only obvious if you could get out.” She stroked his chest, fingers damp from the glass she’d been gripping, and said, “It’s good you told me. We shouldn’t have secrets from the start.”
“Yes,” he said, meaning it. Hadn’t he told her most of the truth? Not even Myra or Winifred or Max knew about his prison time. They knew he’d been an exile, but not a prisoner. His rationalizing made him uncomfortable, so he stood and went to the window, telling himself that though it was a good thing to talk, he still had to be safe.
Kate left for the bathroom. Downstairs someone seemed to move in the dark, ducking behind a rail screening a basement entrance. He watched, waiting. Five minutes, ten; he’d been imagining it, then, no one was there, no one cared what he was doing, it was only a shadow shifted by the warm sea-smelling wind through the trees.
July 7
BLOCKS BEFORE THE ORPHANAGE the yellow diversion notices were up, and even this far from the epicenter the blast wave had done its work. Windowless buildings, trees stripped of their greenery, drifts of broken roof slates; London was growing shabby again. A return to the time of the Blitz in a way, though there were differences: fewer fires, if greater blast damage, and a wider swath of misery. Claus felt a peculiar dissonance having his own life headed down a different path, and he wondered if it wasn’t the same for Kate, something he didn’t dare ask, fearing it would wake her from a spell or reopen old wounds. Horst, mostly; her final years with him had been brutal.
Yet for all the past sadness, their times together, dependent on the whims of scheduling and destruction, were generally spontaneous and immensely pleasurable. They were trying to cram years into days, and there wasn’t time for all of it. In St. James’s, Kate had pointed out the Floris Perfumery, where on shopping trips with her mother, their change had been returned on a silver platter after it had been washed and ironed; some evenings Claus and Kate ambled alongside the dried Serpentine or the full Thames, and once on impulse they’d decided to attend a piano recital in the emptied National Gallery, where the month’s single painting was a triumphant Watteau. They’d skipped it when they’d seen the long snaking line to view the art and ended up having peppermint ice cream at an American milk bar instead; feeding each other, smiling, they declared the ice cream better than art.
They were happiest in her apartment, where he and Kate spent hours stretched on her bed, making love or reading aloud to each other from her dubious library, their legs twined, or her head resting on his stomach, and they’d begun to cook, taking advantage of emptying London to find ingredients that only a month or two before had been impossibly scarce: chives, lamb, once even pork. From Winifred he accepted extra potatoes, letting her think he was going to sell them, and they’d peeled them together in companionable silence, Kate making potato pancakes that were burned and salty. They’d laughed about it and tumbled into bed. After, lying next to him, Kate said it was wonderful to want to cook again. Another evening, he stopped by just in time for carrots steamed in beer that tasted remarkably like his mother’s.
The more time they spent together the more Kate switched back and forth from German to English, which he found erotic in bed but problematic in public, and Claus had slipped in his transmissions to Germany; twice in the past week his handler had asked if he was ill—his hand was sketchy and he’d missed a scheduled broadcast—and once he put in the distress signal by accident, though his handler either hadn’t noticed or didn’t comment. It unnerved him, but he refused to curtail his time with her, no matter how tired he became.
One outing, to an American jazz concert at the Royal Chelsea Hospital, had been a rare misstep. Her father had practiced surgery there, and Claus had thought the concert, a surprise for her, would evoke pleasant memories. It hadn’t. Horst had trained there too, it turned out, and the younger Kate had spent hours walking the grounds with her German husband, drilling him on the English names of surgical instruments in preparation for exams, memories she didn’t like being reminded of.
“I can’t go back to what I was,” she’d said. “That’s always been the case. After Horst died, I couldn’t inhabit my old life in Germany or my previous one in England, so I tried to make a new one in France. That didn’t work, so history washed me up here once again. I won’t go forward pretending that the past hasn’t happened, but I don’t want to dwell on it either.”
Coming away from the Royal Chelsea, she’d told him about Horst’s final years. She hadn’t realized how depressed he’d become. He’d survived the blockade’s starvation, the euphoria of its lifting, the hyperinflation that followed, the street battles between right and left during the long years of the twenties, but the Nazi rise to power in the early thirties had defeated him. He believed the anti-Jewish and anti-foreign rallies were a sign of impending war, a war he didn’t want to live through, not in his helpless condition, and he’d killed himself by drinking a cocktail of mothballs and ammonia, though unfortunately he hadn’t been able to drink enough of it to die swiftly.
His mother, not wanting to admit the truth, had ignored the burns to his throat, mouth, and chest, and had treated him as if he had an ulcer, giving milk and lime water, and toward the end even a nutrient enema. But the bleeding from his stomach; his fever; his severely tender upper abdomen—all indicated a perforated stomach, Kate said, and everything Mrs. Zweig did only increased his pain
and danger.
Mrs. Zweig’s funeral followed Horst’s by a month, and with Marie busily married and the despised Hitler in power, Kate had had little reason to remain behind. So, France, until France too had become untenable.
All of this had come out in bits and pieces on a long walk, and even now he wasn’t sure he had it properly ordered, as he never felt he could ask too much, nor did it help that she described some of it in German as her German was a dialect he had trouble understanding at times. Still, switching to German made sense. Putting it in another language was a way to put it in another life.
A foray to Brompton Cemetery, which on the surface might have seemed depressing, had been happier. Kate’s father was buried there, and at one point her brothers had been too, and they’d visited to clear the grave of two decades’ growth. All three brothers had joined up during the war’s first days; one died in training, one his first day in battle, and one, Reginald, her favorite, during the war’s last days. Her father had been an ardent militarist, her mother against the war from the start, and when her last son had been killed she’d determined never to let them rest by their father’s side. Shortly after the war she’d had her sons’ graves moved to Bristol, where she was from, and left her husband behind. Kate had yet to see their graves, but to keep the cemetery visit from becoming morose, she’d brought with her blue builder’s chalk and wax paper in addition to shears and hand trowels, and after they finished their grave clearing, each of them had chosen a favorite stone and made a rubbing. Claus gave his to Kate.
He’d discovered that her collarbones and the undersides of her forearms were inordinately sensitive, and that she didn’t like to have them touched in the same manner or with the same pressure from one time to the next, while she’d found that using her lips and tongue on the small of his back and reaching around front to grip him made his entire body shiver. The closer he came to the orphanage, the more impossible it seemed to feel such joy.