The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  “Gas,” a man in blue overalls said, and Claus caught its rank scent. “No matches.” But no one put out his cigarette.

  An American in a dark blue air force uniform said, “Why doesn’t somebody get a shovel, for God’s sake?” People were digging in the rubble with small trowels and handsaws.

  Claus didn’t want to call attention to himself and no one else responded.

  “Jesus,” the American said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  He went off. It was possible he’d find one—the main ruin had been a department store—but doing so was useless. Though the wreckage looked easily moved, everyone there had seen enough blasts to know that just below its pebbly surface it was nearly impossible to shift in volume. Broken rafters, skewed joists, destroyed furniture, collapsed stairways; whatever was to be moved was to be moved by hand. And with the gas, anyone trapped underground was probably already dead. Better that way, more peaceful, though again no one would say so.

  “And the dead?” Claus asked a WVF worker beside a radio blown intact into the street, hands on the shoulders of a tiny elderly woman whose legs and lips trembled and whose gray hair kept falling over her face; her flowered smock was absurdly childish.

  “Eleven off, so far,” the WVF woman said, “but there’ll be more. The bus landed on a queue. And in those houses we’ll find dozens.” She took out a comb and began ministering to the woman, who stolidly withstood the grooming. Each stroke uncovered black hair, the dark strands turning the woman younger. Dust, not age, had grayed her, though from her face Claus would never have guessed it, and eventually she was transformed into a child. It took a few seconds for his shock to pass.

  “When did it hit?” he said at last.

  “Six eleven.”

  “Are you certain?” It was time to redirect the bombs, Bertram could go to hell. Madge, Kate’s hospital; the V-1s were coming too close, though altering the coordinates without the exact time would be useless. They might confuse it with another launching.

  She pointed the grimy comb at the clock. “See?”

  It stood outside a news vendor’s, which still had its plate-glass window even though its interior was demolished, but the impact could have blown the clock hands forward or back; he’d have to ask someone else who’d been there. The girl’s eyes were dull, she’d survived the blast but wouldn’t be able to tell him anything, so he repeated the time to himself, then borrowed paper and a pencil from the woman and wrote down the figures, worried he’d forget them. His postconcussion memory was still dicey.

  “Wait,” the WVF woman said when he turned away. “Were you to meet someone? Someone we should look for?”

  He continued on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Sir,” he said. “Can you help me?” Reckless to be so brazen, but he didn’t care.

  The man smiled. Blood clotted the side of his face. “Need directions?”

  “No. But thank you. I was wondering, do you know what time the bomb hit?”

  “It wasn’t a bomb.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He winked. The blood around his eye made his eyelid stick. “It was a gas main. Exploded. The damnedest thing.”

  “Right. Could you tell me when? Exactly?”

  The man looked him over. He had to be an official to give out the gas-main line, and Claus didn’t want to raise his suspicions, especially since without his uniform he lacked official cover. Claus breathed deeply, genuinely afraid. “It’s my wife, you see. She came down to get a paper, and . . .”

  “Haven’t seen her since?”

  “No.”

  “Six ten, I believe. Where was she coming from?”

  “Over there.” Claus pointed over his shoulder. What was the name of the street with the lime trees? Starcross Place? “Starcross Terrace,” he said. He started to move away. “Thank you. She was here about six. If she didn’t stop to talk, she’ll be all right. Excuse me, I have to look.”

  From behind the overturned bus Claus saw the bloodied man watching him, then signal to two others, and Claus turned and shouldered through a group of women, back toward Hampstead Road, fighting the visceral urge to run. If it had been dark he would have been safe mingling with the crowd or sheltering in a doorway, but with the summer light he couldn’t lose them and running would only increase their suspicions. Above him people leaned out of windows, two men in shirtsleeves, a young blond woman in a green apron, a pale child. Did they know he was being followed? He didn’t want to get shot in the back. He took the paper from his pocket as footsteps pounded toward him over the wet streets and swallowed it, sharp as glass going down his throat.

  “You there, stop! I’d like a word with you!”

  Claus kept walking, as if he hadn’t a clue they might be talking to him, though he began to hurry despite himself and his renewed dizziness. How stupid to be arrested for wanting to help people. Why now, when thousands of other times over the past few years he’d been out for information that ostensibly aided the Germans?

  July 23

  LIGHT CAME BEFORE the warder’s whistle, but Claus had been awake for hours. Bruised arms and hips—the detectives had beaten him professionally, avoiding his head and face—yet what disturbed him most was his cellmate’s incessant pacing. Six steps, a scraping of his laceless shoes as he pivoted at the wall, six more steps back to the door, all accompanied by a relentless low mumble. From the bottom bunk, Claus had a good view of red-rimmed ankles, rubbed raw by the shoes’ stiff leather, and of too short flannel pants stopping halfway down fat white calves.

  His cellmate paused as, farther down the block, another cell door squeaked open, followed by passing footsteps and muffled voices. Kitchen workers; breakfast would probably be served soon. Despite everything, Claus was hungry.

  The sounds of passage died out and the pacing began again. Claus wanted him to knock it off but decided not to fight. Instead he faced the cinder-block wall and pulled his damp, sour blanket over his head, drifting into a kind of milky sleep. His Schuylkill cellmate, Larry Baxter, had been a muttering pacer, going on about revenge. Against his wife, against the warden, against Earl Yarborough, their block bully.

  For a while at Schuylkill, Claus had been a thread waxer. He was given a grapefruit-sized ball of blue wax and spools of thread, which day after day he pushed through the wax and re-bobbined while sitting in a square, mustard-colored room with windows on two sides and the guard standing along the blank front wall near the wood stove. His fingers were coated with wax, his hair, it got in his eyes; eating was difficult because of his slippery fingers and the nauseating smell. For diversion, inmates bet on which raindrop would slide down the glass first or held cockroach races on their worktables. Summertime, greenhead flies flew through the tilted-in windows, and the prisoners argued over whether they should stifle in the heat or be tormented by the merciless greenheads, whose bites were enormously painful, the arguments circular and repetitive and totally pointless. Yarborough decided, and Yarborough always chose flies in the morning and heat in the afternoons.

  One prisoner delivered bobbins of waxed thread to leatherworkers in another building, a prized duty because you got to move about, and for a long time it was Baxter’s, but then he’d done something to anger Yarborough and lost it. Ever afterward Yarborough delighted in hounding him, Baxter in planning his revenge. During one especially hot July morning, flies crawling over the sticky worktables, the air so humid Claus felt he could lean against it, Baxter looped a length of waxed thread around a fat, drowsy fly to keep as a kind of pet, anchoring the leash with a chunk of wax. Every now and then the fly flew awkward buzzing loops over Baxter’s head only to land beside him again, making everyone laugh. The guard, woken by the break in routine, looked baffled, causing even more laughter, and for an hour Baxter was a hero for getting revenge on their tormentors. Yarborough’s face grew darker and darker.

  At last Yarborough threw his neighbor’s ball of wax at the sleeping guard and in the ensuing struggle—Yarborough stepping away from his workbench s
o the guard could strike Merkle with his cosh—Yarborough grabbed the fly leash. When the guard fell asleep again, Yarborough held his blue ball of wax over Baxter’s fly. “I’m going to kill it, Baxter, you watch.”

  Yarborough wasn’t going to kill it, that was obvious, he had power over Baxter only while he kept the fly alive, and Claus wondered why Baxter didn’t simply capture another. Instead, he whined, begged, and offered cigarettes, an embarrassing display that only increased Yarborough’s power. Then, surprisingly, Yarborough flattened the fly, revealing that it wasn’t the power to make Baxter beg Yarborough had been after—or rather, not just that—but to show Baxter that nothing he did or said could ever influence him. Why enslave someone when you could crush him? Claus had always thought it his most important prison lesson.

  His reverie ended when the warder’s whistle blew. As if on cue a beam of red sunlight splashed against the far wall, and his cellmate stood on the edge of Claus’s bed to look out the window. Claus pushed his cellmate’s feet off the thin mattress without a word.

  “Oof, I am sorry,” his cellmate said. “Rude of me.” His English was good but heavily accented. Claus suspected instantly that he’d been put in the cell for a reason.

  “I’m used to being by myself, and to watch the sun rise over the surrounding fields.” He smiled at Claus. “But I have to stand on the bed to see.”

  “Day to start a new habit,” Claus said, and sat up.

  The man laughed. “This is funny!” His thick glasses magnified his eyes, which darted back and forth so quickly they seemed to be trembling.

  In the other cells men were getting up and shuffling about in response to the whistle; running water, calling to each other. A few cells down one even yodeled.

  “Shut up, you stupid fuck,” a guard said, and banged the door with his baton.

  Claus said, “So, you’ve not had a cellmate before?”

  “No. By myself, always”

  That seemed true. Trousers as short as a schoolboy’s, coat sleeves so long the coat might have been his father’s; he’d been kept in isolation. You traded only in the showers.

  “For how long?” Claus asked.

  “More than a month now. Almost forty days.”

  Claus calculated. Forty days before, a spy had come over to deliver the crystal for his radio. Bertram had passed it on after the man was caught.

  “And when did you lose the shoelaces?”

  The man looked down at his feet. “Yesterday afternoon. Peculiar. They gave me other things back, but took my laces and belt. When they gave them to me, I thought, Kaput! They are seeing their mistake and letting me go!”

  That explained his pacing. Before parole hearings, Claus’s nerves were almost tangible, a heavy stomach, sleeplessness, but he was also fatalistic, so when parole was denied—as it always was, treason being to parole boards unpardonable—his scalding bitterness lasted only a day or two. Then he’d sink back into routine, knowing that hope was necessary in small doses but dangerous in large ones, though calibrating it properly was often impossible. Raw ankles and a sleepless night; this man had hopes of freedom.

  “Knew I was coming,” Claus said, and pointed out his own shoes, also laceless. “Didn’t want us going after each other.”

  The man was clueless not to know it was unusual to suddenly get a cellmate after a long stretch of isolation. Did he not realize he was in danger? Someone was hoping one or the other would do something stupid, and doubtless the cell was bugged. The barred, high window, the metal bunks, the scraped floor and solid walls, the light overhead; that seemed the most likely place.

  “What are you here for?” the man said.

  “Asking too many questions.”

  He paused, as if trying to decide whether or not Claus was warning him off, then snorted. “It’s an inhospitable country.”

  There was no sense avoiding it; Claus might as well know. “And you?”

  The man shrugged. “I tried to explain who I was, and they wouldn’t listen.”

  Before he could finish, the breakfast bugle blew and Claus stood reflexively.

  “No,” the man said, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Not for us, I think. Always to me they bring the breakfast. Unless for you it’s different.”

  Just as well. As at Schuylkill, the food would probably be cold, and if he was going to eat cold food he preferred to stay put. He rolled back onto his bunk to wait.

  “You see,” the man said, sitting next to Claus without being asked. Claus ignored it, sensing it wasn’t a challenge. “They don’t want me to talk to anyone, except now to you. A spy, they say. You they must not to trust either.”

  Thick and clumsy, with thinning curly hair, ineligible for military service because of flat feet and vibrating eyes, his name was Dieter Einschuffen; he came from Dortmund and was the source of the persistent garlicky smell Claus had thought peculiar to the cell. Before the war he’d been a photographer’s assistant, though his most recent job had been as an inspector at an Alsatian tool-and-die factory, overseeing hundreds of Frenchmen.

  “They don’t bother me,” he said of his eyes, “but the military, they worry I don’t shoot straight. Though that’s just good. I couldn’t stand Hitler and the Nazis from the start. In the army, what would I have done? Here!” he said, apropos of nothing. “I’ve got news clippings about myself.”

  A wallet full, about his supposed resistance activities, including grainy pictures.

  Claus wouldn’t reveal that he understood German. “What do they say?”

  “They’re about explosions in the factory. I set them off.”

  Claus handed them back. No real resistance member would carry such a cache of documents, since at the first inspection he’d have been caught and killed. An incredibly naïve amateur spy then.

  “And here, see?” He thumbed through the clippings to a more recent one. “How do you say this? Zeitung?”

  Tempted, Claus didn’t answer.

  Dieter snapped his fingers and supplied the word for himself. “Newspaper. That’s it. Now I’m in the English newspapers.”

  Accounts of his arrest and internment. “Where did you get these?” Claus said.

  “The guards. Some of them are almost friendly.”

  A death sentence. He seemed not to realize that if the English had planned to turn him, they’d never have announced his capture.

  There was a rattling at the door, the lock turned, and the door swung back on old, noisy hinges. Two guards carrying trays stood in the hallway.

  “‘Ave we got a feast for you!” one said, and they put the trays on the ground.

  Claus stood, holding up his unbelted pants. “Spam and eggs. It figures.”

  “Yes? How so?”

  “It’s Sunday,” Claus said, as if that explained it.

  “Sunday?” Dieter said.

  “Seems like the world over, Sunday in prison means Spam and eggs.”

  Claus retreated to his bed and had already started cutting the rubbery slab when he realized Dieter was still watching him.

  “You have been to the prison before?”

  “A long time ago. A mistake.”

  “So it would seem to be often. But before this, I never would have believed it.”

  He tucked his napkin into his collar as if he were in a restaurant and broke his bread carefully into four pieces, eating each after several bites of Spam. Claus had been done for minutes when Dieter took his napkin from his collar and cleaned his lips and placed his silverware neatly by the plate.

  “Are you not going to eat that?” He pointed at Claus’s bread.

  “Not now,” Claus said, and put it on the windowsill.

  Dinner, at four thirty, would consist of tea and a couple of crackers, and Claus hated sleeping hungry. “For after dark,” he said, in explanation. Dieter seemed not to understand. He looked longingly at the bread, his skin such a peculiar texture that a thumb pressed to Dieter’s forearm might leave an impression. A fat man deprived of food; Claus dis
regarded a pang of guilt and turned to the wall, hoping to sleep again. It didn’t work; Dieter’s garlicky presence, his huffing breath as he pressed his ear to the door, listening to other prisoners released for their exercise.

  Claus imagined the yard, as effectively regimented as every other aspect of prison life: the newer prisoners throwing balls to one another, older ones walking around its perimeter, the oldest of all merely leaning against the wall and talking. That had been him at the last, and how ecstatic he’d been when his sentence was finally done, even though release meant exile.

  He’d welcomed it. What did he have to go home to, both parents dead, their store bankrupted, and their home sold to pay legal bills? On the train ride to New York, he’d been certain the woman sitting across from him knew he’d been in prison, though his clothes didn’t give him away; unlike most prisoners, only too happy to accept the government’s shiny blue ex-prisoner suit and square-toed black shoes, he’d had his own clothes to wear. Still, he felt he’d given off some kind of inescapable scent and he’d fiercely avoided her glances.

  The guards arrived now, sloppy and rude, taking back trays and slamming the door closed. Dieter seemed shocked and it felt cruel to have lured this quiet, inoffensive man here, totally unnecessary. Had Dieter really expected to affect the war, to wander the English countryside without being captured? It would be like Bertram to argue such a thing was justified.

  Early in 1942 sixty-one Dutch agents were executed in Holland; they’d been caught because the Germans had broken their cipher. For weeks the Germans had signaled a need for more agents, more guns, and more ammunition, all the while waiting at every drop to capture them. Bertram had told Claus about the operation to show how cunning the Germans were, Claus first thought, but as time passed and rumors percolated about the captured network, Claus decided his purposes were more devious. Such a disaster could hardly be kept secret, and Claus believed he’d been told as a way to divert his attention from an entire other Dutch network that a select few at the MOI knew about, larger, more entrenched in key Dutch cities, which had not lost a single agent. Could it be that Bertram or others had sacrificed dozens of agents so that the Germans would think they’d destroyed the Dutch underground while at the same time being fooled into believing that the invasion of Europe would come in the Netherlands? Most of the captured spies had carried fake invasion documents.