The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  That she had it made sense. She would have sent it on along with everything else back in the thirties: journals, books, a few pieces of furniture, though even those Bertram viewed with suspicion. What better way for a spy to insinuate herself than to have all her resources in place before hostilities actually began? It frustrated Claus. What, exactly, was he looking for? Since she readily admitted to having lived in Germany, nothing from Germany was necessarily incriminating, and nothing in this well-ordered apartment held a clue, or rather it all did, but clues that could be read any number of ways.

  On the shelf was the blue builder’s chalk they’d used on their cemetery outing, next to her perfume bottles with their decorative stoppers: a nude wrapped in a floral scarf. Hoffman. He grabbed one, pulled the stopper, inhaled. It was comforting and he did it again until the scent lost its power, when he put the bottle on her bedside table to rest his nose. At a noise behind him he turned swiftly, an explanation already forming on his lips, knocking over the bottle with his elbow. It shattered on the floor. No one was behind him—the building had simply settled—but what was he going to do now?

  For a long minute he stood looking at the perfume pooling on the floor around the shiny broken ceramic shards, then pushed over a stack of books and sent them tumbling, to make it seem like a robbery. He’d seen enough of those to make it look believable, and as he pulled apart the lavender sachet from her drawer, he found it oddly satisfying to create here some of the disaster, on however small a scale, that he’d spent hours digging through elsewhere, and suddenly he was destroying everything, knocking over and tearing down and ripping indiscriminately, saying, “That’s for Winifred and that’s for Winifred and that’s for Myra,” which only fed his fury.

  When he was done, his breathing was labored and his nose was running and the air was filled with feathers. Some stuck to his damp hands, and, looking at his feathered fingers, he couldn’t believe what he’d done. What had he accomplished? He was no closer to the truth—whatever that might be—and Kate’s apartment was in shambles, and now he felt guilty in addition to powerless. What a fool.

  He grabbed a handful of clothes and tucked them under his arms along with several of her journals, the earliest, the most recent, and three or four random ones, then hurtled out the door and down the steps into the street, where despite his worry that the police would mistake him for a looter he began to run. A stupid thing to do, committing one crime to cover another, though what that original crime was he couldn’t say. Having doubted Kate? Or not having doubted her enough?

  July 27

  THE HEAT AND UNMOVING AIR made the smell of formaldehyde seem stronger. Feet kept tapping by in the busy hallway and now and then Claus lifted his head, but mostly he sat and stared at his script. His long absence had doomed the film, though Max had tried to soften the blow.

  “Hold on to it,” he’d said, returning a copy. “It’s very good. Perhaps after the war you can have it made commercially. It might be even better that way.” The time for propaganda films had come and gone, the possibility of funds vanished. “I’m keeping the other copy, just in case that changes. And I’m bringing it to every meeting that might have the remotest mention of funding. I’ll have something ready—something good—to show them.”

  Max’s kindness had been hard to bear; it smacked of pity, and Claus detected in it a tone of resigned fatherly understanding that Max had used with others from his days at Strand Films, people who’d thought they might be able to work their way back into the business under his auspices at the MOI. Max always had to tell them they couldn’t.

  Claus shoved the script aside, Kate’s journals too. The entries detailing her arrival in England, her time in France, her final years in Hamburg, were written upside down in different-colored ink between earlier entries from years ago. Reading them, especially those covering Horst’s decline and death, had drained him. Her hand was slightly changed: a greater slant to the letters, tighter loops; older and wiser, perhaps, certainly sadder. How could she not be? But upside-down writing was hard to follow if you weren’t trained to mentally block out the other lines, something the Germans had schooled him in by scissoring out every other line on a sheet of blank paper. If Bertram was right, she’d have learned the same method from the same masters.

  In his apartment, he’d laid one page flat on the ironing board, the gentle heat of the iron meant to bring out any organic inks—lemon, most likely, as she’d had so many. After a few passes with the iron he peered closely, found nothing. Next was vaporized iodine, which no hidden writing could withstand, but having neither the requisite tin oven nor the time to purchase one, he’d mixed powdered iodine, water, and a bit of crushed aluminum in his sink and stood back from the explosive reaction, the acrid purple vapor that browned the paper and settled wherever the page had been disturbed. There’d been no secret inks and no hidden messages, no obvious reason to mistrust her, only the visible and now discolored lines.

  He’d felt a dupe holding the mess, unsurprisingly; the spy Bertram suspected her of being wouldn’t be caught so easily. Then he’d sat and read. His own name was in the final entry, along with Sylvie’s. Sylvie had asked her to walk after their shift and Kate had agreed, but soon came to regret it. They seemed to have little to talk about, and soreness pulsed from her ankles to her calves the longer they went. Her face was cold, her eyelids weighted, the silence between them grew and grew; she felt she could almost lean against it. At Park Square, Sylvie steered her onto a curving gravel path where, in a small declivity surrounded by dying elms, a sparse crowd sat listening to an orchestra play some early Delius. Appalachia. The calm violin gave way to the rushing Dixieland trumpets, pounding drums superceded the trumpets, and then all yielded to the delicate triangle. Sylvie’s touch on her elbow stopped her.

  Sylvie had leaned against the back of a wooden bench and began to hum along as a gust of wind stirred up the scent of decaying leaves. Her humming seemed somehow intimate, and Kate felt a surge of warmth for her, almost affection.

  The piece ended, the rim of the eastern sky deepened to indigo, and the surrounding granite buildings, pink moments before, faded to a pearlescent gray. Their way back toward the park entrance wound along the path, wet grass brushing their ankles, and they passed a beggar, a mother with three young children. Young herself—her dirty face looked no more than sixteen—she squeezed two of the children between her knees while holding the third upright on her shoulder to stop its crying. Her laddered brown stockings bagged around her ankles, and her collarless coat had no buttons; she held it closed with the same red hand she used to support her colicky baby. Kate had felt so close to Sylvie until she’d made the comment about the beggar being a Jew.

  The force of her anger and guilt was the kind of thing she would have shared with Horst, she’d written, and that she wanted to share it with Claus stunned her; she hadn’t understood he meant that much to her. It seemed almost a betrayal of Horst, leaving Germany for France, France for England, and there meeting another man, as if layer by layer she’d sloughed off all their years together, move by move their shared past, and now was creating a new communal future with someone else.

  If she was a spy the lines had probably been planted on the off chance Claus would read them, but he couldn’t help wishing she’d written more. An earlier journal contained a passage from her German postwar years. Horst was alive but turning reclusive, and Kate had written of her peculiar, troubling feelings. Before the war Horst had been glamorous and it had felt noble to sacrifice every bit of her past to join him in exile, and during the war, regardless of the rightness of the German cause, they’d done what they could to save and restore shattered human lives, but in the long years after, nearly all of her family gone, she found herself increasingly isolated in Germany, neither fully German nor completely English. One Christmastime, the blockade long over, the hyperinflation past, a bit of political stability settling on the city, she’d begun frequenting an English store in the fashionable Harvest
ehude district.

  Carols had poured from a Victrola that was wrapped in a plaid ribbon for the holidays and surrounded by cured hams—one was “Good King Wenceslas,” Kate’s favorite. She’d stood beside it, reminded of the poulterers in London, the fat geese and slimmer ducks hanging from overhead hooks, as she hummed along with the boys’ choir, her nose vibrating on the lower notes as the king pushed on through the snow. When he’d completed his mission of mercy, she chose four Bosc pears and half a dozen exotic oranges and moved on to the lemons, where she’d paused, wondering if she should restore the holiday tradition of her childhood, a blue ceramic bowl of them in the kitchen on the coldest, darkest days of the year. For tea, to spice the punch, to put on the Dutch oven spiked with cloves like a pincushion, as an ingredient in her father’s favorite cookies. One couldn’t control for such things, so why not give in a bit to the past, since it was so insistent? She’d dropped a half a dozen in her bag and moved on.

  In line, she’d found herself behind a tall woman with a streak of silver in her hair and a festive green and gold holiday scarf knotted elegantly at her neck. Partridges and pear trees with a running border of holly, the small irregular berries bright as rubies.

  Kate touched the woman’s arm. “What a beautiful scarf,” she’d said in German.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, looking at her blankly. “I don’t speak German.”

  Kate repeated what she’d said in English.

  “Oh, this? Thank you.” The woman fingered it and smiled. “From my son.”

  Kate had removed her hand when the woman’s glance flicked over it, worried that her touch had been inappropriate; the English were particular about that and after so many years abroad she’d forgotten some of the rules. “He has exquisite taste.”

  The woman leaned closer and Kate caught a whiff of her perfume, Domaine dePuy, something she herself wore, which gladdened her. Perhaps they were kindred spirits. “I went with him to pick it out. If I didn’t, I’d get something orange or purple. You know how sons are. They get their taste from their fathers.”

  Kate had smiled sympathetically and nodded.

  The clerk rang up the woman’s last purchase, bagged it, and announced the total, and the woman turned to pay. She waited for her change without resuming their conversation, and Kate reminded herself not to get her hopes up, but then took a chance anyway. It was the holiday season, after all, people tended to be more open, and the store’s bright interior made the world seem less grim than it had in her darkened bedroom the night before. The season had awoken a desire for companionship that was hard to suppress, a desire for interaction with others not her family and that went beyond holiday greetings from a grocer and a mere exchange of pleasantries with the girl who parceled out her medicines or the man who cut her hair.

  “Does your son live nearby?”

  “Yes.” A quick shift of the head though not of the shoulders, which remained turned away, a briefer smile. “About a mile from here.”

  “Do you see him often, more than just the holidays?”

  “No,” she’d said, and folded her change and tucked it in her wallet, then dropped the wallet in one of the brown bags and scooped the bags into her arms. “This is my first time here, and probably my last. The truth is, I don’t like the Germans.” From around one of the bags she’d raised two fingers to Kate as she left. “Ta-ta.”

  The worst thing about both those scenes, Claus thought, was that they were scenes. They’d have been perfect for his movie, showing the returning refugee’s loneliness, the things she’d had to overcome, and he’d have filmed them both, to show her life as an exile. He felt an upsurge of bitterness that he couldn’t, of anger; for one mad moment he had an image of a vast conspiracy between Kate and Max and Bertram, their wanting him to think he could make a film and then crushing his dream.

  Footsteps came closer, and an unfamiliar, heavyset woman stood in his doorway.

  “Mr. Charles?” she said.

  He recognized the voice, though it took him a second to place it, during which time she reached up to resettle her brown hat.

  “Greta!” The German, Bertram had said. Find out anything you can from her. Or at least about her. He stood, embarrassed that he couldn’t recall her last name, though not surprised she couldn’t remember his.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “So you remember me. Good, I hope it is not with badness.”

  “Not at all.” He came around the desk to take her hand. “Please, have a seat.”

  She sat and smiled, but her face looked troubled.

  “I am sorry to say this, but you look the sick,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He sat down behind his desk and said he was, though he knew he looked terrible. He didn’t remember clearly what he’d done during the last twelve hours. More work as a warden, certainly, as someone had thanked him for helping her change a tire, and Mrs. Dobson had said early this morning that he looked quite the sight leading a goat out of the nearby stables with all the horses following him. She’d sounded insane so he hadn’t responded and had gone to his room, where he’d found a doll on his bed that he didn’t know if he’d put there as some kind of signal. He’d counted the plates in his sink to see if he’d had supper—he hadn’t—and tried to take a bath, once again filling the tub beyond the black line. He’d known Mrs. Dobson was listening because the floor creaked as she shifted her feet outside the door, but he’d ignored her, though in the end she had her victory, as the water was tepid.

  “I have heard that there is here something you might be able to help me with,” Greta said. “A record. I’d like to want to make one.”

  “Oh. You sing? I didn’t know.”

  Her cheeks reddened and she shifted her handbag on her knees. “To make one, yes, but not the singing.”

  She gazed at his desk, at Kate’s journals, and he wondered if she recognized them. Unlikely, but he couldn’t cover them right away or she’d notice. She turned her attention back to him and he was glad. “For my family?” She slipped into German—“Meine Eltern?”—then switched back to English. “They still to live there, you see. I was hoping to hear them my voice.”

  He was surprised to find himself flustered at her childish smile, so desperate and full of hope. As a warden he was used to helping people, sending them to the local salvage department to recover goods or to the city council for housing vouchers, but in the ministry he was never asked to do so. It made him feel out of place. He knew of people making wax recordings, a few simple words they could send abroad, to friends in Sweden, perhaps, who might send them on to Germany. “We don’t do that here, I’m afraid. That would have to be a sound studio.” Where they must have some controls, he thought, especially for those making records in German.

  “Not here?” She was obviously trying to keep up her smile.

  “No.” He took out paper, letting the extra sheets fall and cover the journals, and scribbled an address of another MOI office that put out records.

  Her lips moved as she sounded out the unfamiliar English words.

  “Try them. It’s in White City,” he said, and watched her reaction. She didn’t flinch or flush.

  She read it again and smiled. “I know where it is,” she said. “Near my church.”

  “Ah, you’re religious,” Claus said.

  Without leaving her seat she turned and looked behind her. It was almost a parody of caution, something from the beginnings of the silent-film era. If Griffith had seen it, he’d have fainted.

  She leaned toward him and whispered. “No,” she said. “It’s about the kaiser.”

  He shook his head, not understanding.

  “Mrs. Zweig has told me you’re part German. Ja?”

  He nodded.

  “I pray for him. The anniversary of his birth.” Then she colored and put a hand to her mouth. “I should not to say anything. Please don’t to tell. I could be in the trouble.”

  He tried to reassure her. No use scaring her off. She was eithe
r a genuine fool or a brilliant actor, as good as Kate if Bertram was right. And Kate’s telling Greta of his ancestry fit either scenario. He couldn’t keep her here any longer, so he stood and walked her to the door.

  She held up the address before tucking it in her bag. “I can to say you told me?”

  “Of course.” He said goodbye to her. Max stood in the hallway, watching her go. Claus didn’t want any more avuncular advice. He turned back, picked up the journals, and left, shutting the door behind him, walking by the smiling Max without stopping or speaking a word, unwilling to give Max the pleasure of being magnanimous.

  “I’M AFRAID I HAVE plans for a picnic,” Kate said. She stood in her doorway, looking displeased. He’d asked her to drive with him to the country but she’d still barely opened the door. He thought he could better clarify things somewhere they had no history. London had become theirs, them.

  “Please,” he said. “You must.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Must?”

  He rocked back on his heels and closed his eyes. Too forceful. He breathed out heavily and started again.

  “I’m sorry. I need your help. That’s all I mean.”

  “You do look terrible,” she said. Her pause gave him hope. Then she said, “But as I told you, I have plans. A kind of picnic that we’ve arranged for the patients.”

  He smelled cooking, a baked pie crust. It made him wish for home. He stepped back. “I should go.”

  “Wait.” She opened the door a fraction more. “Why did you disappear?”

  “I was digging. My sector was hit hard. Our post too.” He held up his hands to show his dirty fingernails. No matter how he scrubbed he couldn’t get them clean.

  “But Greta saw you, at the MOI. She told me.”