The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  The Germans are sending people now, I’m sure of it.

  But you caught that one.

  There are others. It must be a firsthand account.

  He was about to give the parachute-factory coordinates when the front doorbell rang. He hadn’t made it this far by being sloppy, so he broke off the transmission, put the key away, shoved the drawer closed, and turned the switch from Gramophone to Radio. Steps approached his door, followed by a quick, quiet knock.

  He buried the paper from which he’d been transmitting among the pages of script spread across his table and opened the door to Kate.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, stepping in and hugging him. That perfume again.

  He tried to compose his face, as the trick was to look as if she’d caught him in the middle of something, just not in the middle of something he shouldn’t have been doing. Unable to stop himself, he said, “How did you get in?”

  “The front door was open. I waited but no one came. I’m sorry,” she said, catching his tone. “Should I not have come?”

  “No. Of course you should.” He pulled her farther into the room, looked down the hallway, and shut the door. “It just surprised me. I was thinking about you, and it was as if I’d conjured you up. We’ll have to be quiet.” His voice was just above a whisper. “My landlady.”

  “I know,” she said, whispering too. “But I had to see you. I was out for a walk with Sylvie and something dreadful happened.”

  “The Russian nurse? Is she all right?”

  “Yes. No.” She sat on the edge of his couch and looked around. “My,” she said. “Homey.”

  The rooms had always seemed fine to him, but he saw them now through her eyes, barren rather than spare, a place that didn’t look like a home. His spying of course, and yet something more, a desire that if someone stumbled across him, he’d give no offense, go unnoticed; a habit he’d picked up in prison. It came as a shock to realize how much his past still controlled him.

  She touched his arm. “When our shift ended Sylvie asked me to walk with her, and I agreed.

  “We passed a beggar. A woman with three children, barely out of her teens herself, it looked. So poor. Laddered stockings, filthy clothes. I was reaching into my bag for some coins when Sylvie put her hand on my arm and whispered, ‘Don’t.’ So I passed her by, pretending to have been looking for cigarettes.” She paused and took a breath, lowered her voice once again. “When we were a bit further on, I asked Sylvie if she knew her, if the woman was running some type of scam. Drinking with the money she raised, perhaps. She laughed! ‘God, no,’ she said. ‘But I could tell from looking at her she was a Jew. If you give her money, she’d only breed.’”

  “How horrible,” Claus said.

  “There was something about it that made it seem worse. It was so, I don’t know,” she said, raising a spread-fingered hand.

  Claus supplied the word. “Casual.”

  “Yes, that’s it!” she said, and touched him. “Perfect.” She seemed inordinately pleased that he understood her. “That threw me. That she’d have assumed I’d agree with her. What kind of person does she take me for?”

  “Bigots think everyone is bigoted.”

  “I hope you’re right.” She shuddered, as if any other possibility was appalling, then brightened when he whispered a few words to her in German. “I forgot to tell you. You have an admirer. Greta.”

  “Greta?”

  “Yes. She saw you in White City. Picked you out right away, and was very pleased to have done so.”

  “What was she doing there?” Claus asked, careful to keep his question from sounding urgent. Greta was German after all.

  “Some of our nurses might be moving to the area. Casualty overflows from Normandy. She was checking out a converted warehouse.”

  “Well, if she saw the same things I did, she’ll know that any such move is unlikely. A few direct V-1 hits.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  “No. Lots of buildings gone, but luckily no one was in them.”

  “I haven’t seen the area in ages; since 1908, I think. The great Franco-British Exhibition. Father loved it.”

  “Never been to the dog track?”

  She laughed. “My family would have been appalled.”

  “We’ll have to go,” he said.

  “I knew there was a reason I loved you,” she said, and took his face between her warm hands and kissed him.

  There was a knock on the door, much louder than Kate’s; Mrs. Dobson must have heard them. “Mr. Murphy?” she said, and knocked again, which gave him the time he needed. He ushered Kate into his closet and picked up a few pages of his script to have something in his hand when he opened the door.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Murphy,” she said, and smiled, showing her yellowed front teeth. Her small blue eyes had almost disappeared. “But it’s rather an extraordinary situation. No tea this evening, I’m afraid. The gas has gone out.”

  He didn’t believe her. The false smile and the pipes still knocking as the last of Mr. Morgan’s bath drained away, her face a mixture of anger and disappointment, but of course he couldn’t say so. He opened the door wider and let her in.

  She strode past him to the middle of the room, where she turned her head from side to side, then moved closer to the closet.

  “Are you alone?” she said. “I thought I heard voices.” She reminded her tenants from time to time that they’d agreed never to have female visitors in their rooms, as she ran a respectable establishment. Mr. Ivory, who’d ignored the strictures in the first months of Claus’s tenancy, had been forced to leave the very same day Mrs. Dobson found out.

  “The wireless,” he said, which he’d been smart enough to switch on as he moved toward the door. He turned it off now so she wouldn’t notice that it was still warming up. “And I’ve been practicing my lines aloud.” He waved the script at her.

  “You do the female parts convincingly,” she said, her gravelly voice dropping in register, and, breathing deeply, she looked at the closet with her lined cheeks glowing, as if refraining from opening it was making her feverish. She couldn’t declare her distrust—on the small chance that she was wrong she’d never recover her dignity—and as long as Kate was quiet he was safe.

  He thought, not for the first time, that she’d missed her calling: a born schoolmistress, meant to intimidate students into acquiescence, and if he ever needed such a character in a film he’d be sure to cast her. He felt a peculiar mounting pressure in his chest, which he at last identified as pleasure. In the situation, in knowing that his landlady suspected him, in teasing her by not hurrying her along. Kate understood what was necessary, but of course she might grow disoriented in the dark and stumble backward or simply have to shift or sneeze, and he had a wild fantasy of what would happen if he was thrown out. London was emptying, he could always move into Winifred’s building, or Kate’s; the apartment below hers was vacant. I knew there was a reason I loved you. He’d be re-inhabiting a younger, less fearful self.

  But merely flirting with a costly decision was good enough for now. He turned Mrs. Dobson’s bluff back on her.

  “Come,” he said, taking her elbow. “We can’t go without tea, can we? It won’t feel right. Let’s duck around the corner and see if they still have gas.”

  They did. “Must have come back on quickly,” Mrs. Dobson said, and they hadn’t been seated five minutes when Kate strolled past the window. How smart of her to let him know she was safely out. He was free to go, but he liked Mrs. Dobson and felt guilty at having provoked her, so he bent toward her over the polished marble tabletop and asked about her sister in Folkestone, which was always good for a quarter of an hour. So many failings! From there they moved on to the potato soup she was making with Winifred’s black-market potatoes, though to be fair she didn’t know their origin, and when she was done he paid and brought her back to his rooms on the pretense of asking if a new stain on the ceiling might be a leak. She’d want t
o come upstairs again but be at a loss for how to do so, and he decided to make it up to her. Kate’s perfume was immediately noticeable.

  Mrs. Dobson turned to him and cocked one eyebrow.

  “So where is this stain?” she said, and he had to keep himself from laughing. She knew she’d been right but was furiously unable to prove it.

  The stain turned out to be nothing, and Mrs. Dobson left after reminding him that he was not to eat food in his rooms after nine o’clock—a direct reference to house rules, with all that implied—and when he shut the door behind her, listening for her retreating footsteps that did not come immediately, the quiet felt weighted without Kate, the rooms smaller. They’d come briefly to life in her presence, and now seemed more thoroughly empty than ever.

  He looked for clues to her visit, some scrap to hold in his memory, but found none, really, or certainly none that Mrs. Dobson was likely to have spotted, though the piece of paper with his encoded message seemed to be sticking out from his script more than he remembered. He pulled it free. Numbers and letters, which he could read as an account of destroyed buildings and delayed manufacturing, but which would have been meaningless to Kate. Still, he’d grown sloppy, and he felt foolish for having even allowed the possibility of being found out. Without a moment’s hesitation he burned it.

  July 14

  CLAUS HANDED KATE a fifth of scotch when she opened her door.

  “My!” She took the green bottle. “You must think me a lush.”

  “Just wanted to show that I have connections too.”

  She laughed. “You’re so transparent. Mein kleines Fenster,” she said, which meant “my little window.” “You must have been a rotten liar as a child.”

  “I was.” He told her about a time at age three he’d broken a piece of a neighbor’s fencing and let a pig out and had run home to tell his father that he’d done nothing.

  Two nights before, he and Kate had gone to see The Uninvited, which so scared Kate that she’d asked Claus to sleep on the outside toward the door, and he’d woken alone and shown up at the hospital to surprise her, only to have his mood punctured by the sight of an American major handing Kate a bottle.

  “Oh,” she’d said, and flushed. “Thank you.”

  “No,” he said, bowing his highly coiffed head toward her. “Thank you.”

  He’d nodded at Claus, then gone on his way, smelling of lime aftershave.

  “Who was that?” Claus had asked, unable to keep the curiosity from his voice. The major’s shoulder patch indicated he was with the Big Red One, most of whom were in Normandy, and those left behind would have been fairly senior—planning and intelligence.

  “A patient.”

  “Who gave you scotch?”

  “It was a rather delicate matter.”

  “Wasn’t he the major from the dance club?”

  “Yes.” She seemed to be holding her breath. Then she sighed, put out a hand, and said, “He was embarrassed by his condition and wanted to go to someone he knew. So he came by the hospital and asked for me. I lanced a boil for him. Must have been infinitely more comfortable when it was gone.”

  “Where?”

  “On his buttocks.”

  “Scotch for a pimple on his ass?”

  “It wasn’t just a pimple. Rather larger, I’d say. More like a root vegetable.”

  Their joint, spontaneous laughter broke the tension and caused an elderly woman in black to look at them disapprovingly, but he’d had a lingering case of jealousy, and the scotch was the only way he could think to expunge it. Herbert’s bargain was fierce—two extra night shifts that Claus would have to cover—but seemed worth it.

  Now she put the bottle on her counter and they went down the stairs and out into the bright sunshine where she linked her arm in his. Soon they were near the Green Park tube entrance.

  “There,” Kate said, nodding at a group of elderly Home Guard drilling in mismatched uniforms in the park, their rifles resting sloppily on their shoulders. They marched back and forth between deep trenches that had been dug earlier in the war and now were grown over with lush grass, the long uncut blades bending in the warm wind. “That’s you in twenty years, if the war lasts that long.”

  She was forgiving him his jealousy. “And here’s you, then,” he said of a dowdy Salvage woman striding toward them with a red face. “Angry I’ve forgotten the steak and kidney pie.”

  She tugged his arm, pulling him closer. “Oh, we’ll be a fine couple, won’t we?”

  It was a moment of intense pleasure for him, that she could anticipate a shared future. Max had a draft of his script, and Claus was off on an outing with a woman he loved. He raised her clasped hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers.

  “And now,” he said, “I’m going to fully corrupt you.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  “Oh, I will. By the end of the afternoon, you’ll be a committed gambler.”

  His mood darkened in the overcrowded station. It smelled as always of sweat and piss, but what bothered him were the hundreds of people who seemed to have moved their entire lives there—beds, coat hooks, kitchens; his usual tube stations were too small for these tableaux. The people had marked out their areas with chalk and hanging blankets, and some even had plants and Victrolas. Two small boys were peeling carrots and chattering about German planes—one claimed to have seen a new type—but worse were the people sleeping in an unused side tunnel, ranked one after the other in two parallel rows with a narrow passage between them; unmoving in the near dark, extending to the edge of vision, they looked like lumps of coal ready to be shoveled into a furnace, like bodies lined up after an explosion waiting to be ferried away. Prime candidates for living entombment. He felt a coward for not redirecting the bombs.

  The train clattered into the station and as soon as they boarded and headed out, his chest seemed to expand; it was a pleasure to appear in public with Kate, to have a public life for the first time in years, to have people look at them approvingly. She seemed to enjoy it too, leaning back and rocking against his arms as the train curved around corners and braked, metal squealing, at stations.

  At White City, the tube lights were out—people talking in subdued voices about the explosion above ground that had made the entire station tremble, the roof crack—and the lit flares were smoky. They hurried up the stairs, coughing, eyes watering; Kate moved ahead as Claus helped a pregnant woman, and she turned back to look at him from the top. He blinked, the bright light stinging his smoke-sore eyes, Kate like a cutout of a woman, reaching back with the light shining around her, while brassy music from an elderly band played loudly to welcome all visitors.

  Topside, remembering Bertram’s certainty that new German agents were about, he grabbed Kate and ducked around the corner of the tube entrance, out of the flow of the crowd and the sight of anyone on the stairs, then bent to retie both shoes. He took his time, re-cuffing his pants, wiping his eyes, making sure they hadn’t been followed. Someone lingering below would have seen them dart around the corner and would have hurried after them, but no one came.

  “Come,” he said, and took Kate’s hand. “Let’s go.”

  White City’s blocks of whitewashed buildings dazzled in the sun. Warehouses, factories, huge hangars that had temporary walls; here and there remnants of its earlier incarnation as an exhibition hall and Olympic venue showed—the stadium, under whose enormous shadow they passed on the way to the entrance; and the disused swimming and bicycling pavilions; the turreted, crenellated domes of the French colonial displays.

  “Are those the film buildings?” Kate said, nodding at several large brick warehouses whose damage was obviously recent. Police stood guard outside them.

  “No. War work,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Parachutes are made there, though we’re not supposed to know that.”

  “And how do you, then?” she said, and ran a finger along his jaw. “Secret contacts?”

  He smiled. “Drunks at the track.” Which was true.
He’d picked up several tidbits on his most recent trip, amazed by how quickly bettors would talk while watching races.

  Most of the people in the crowd pushing through the turnstiles were older, and many of them appeared out of work. It was a weekday, and almost everyone that mattered was at work for the war; he found it liberating not to be. A few patrons smelled of beer, though there was a contingent of American naval officers, uniforms pressed and shoes polished, whose healthy youth and relative prosperity drew numerous looks. The infield was inhabited by thousands of standing gulls, all facing west into the wind. He stared out at them, remembering his internment in Brompton, and Kate touched his arm as if she knew what he were thinking.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Bit different from when you remember it?”

  “My God, yes.” She laughed. “We were here for part of the Olympics—I remember the marathon runners staggering toward the finish, and officials helping a British runner across—but never came to the dog track, even though royalty did. My father pointed that out once and my mother refused to relent. ‘They’ll return to their senses soon enough,’ she said.”

  It pleased him to show her a part of England she didn’t know, to make it hers through him. The first race was about to begin so he walked her to the rail and pointed out the box the mechanical rabbit would break from. The dogs with their colorful blankets pounded past, the number-seven dog, white with a white blanket, seeming to have the numeral painted on his fur, stretching at the last for the victory.

  “Quite a dog,” a bearded man next to them said, and dropped his tickets. “Wish I’d bet on her.”

  They had fifteen minutes before the next race, and Claus bought a program.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to one dog’s line: 21-6-13-8 S 38 80 3 6 4 21-1/2 6.25 A Late speed insd. He moved his finger beneath the line as he explained it. “That means the dog’s last race was the first on June twenty-first; it was three-eighths of a mile on a slow track, with the winning time of thirty-eight seconds flat. He weighed eighty pounds, broke from the three hole slowly in sixth place, moved to fourth, was second coming out of the turn, and finished first, half a length in front. Odds were six and a quarter to one at post time in a class-A race, the highest, and he won with late speed on the inside.”