by Paul Griner
“Late patriotism is better than none.”
“It has nothing to do with patriotism. If the Allies win, after the war such a letter proves they were good. It’s a license to print money. And people like that are no less prominent here. Those two aren’t the first. I ran into quite a few when I came over.”
“Oh? You were interrogated?” At Latchmere House, suspected spies were stripped naked and confronted by a screaming officer while their clothes were gone through, their stories repeated and checked, repeated and checked. He’d helped with a few such interrogations.
“What’s terrible is that you’re certain they don’t believe you.”
“They must have. They let you go.”
“Yes. But I still have the sense I’m being watched at times.”
“Followed around? Spies hiding behind newspapers at the cafés?”
“It’s all very well to joke, Claus, but I have my suspicions. That robbery. I’m not at all sure it was a real one. He drank my scotch, but if he liked scotch, there were two entire bottles. Why didn’t he take them? Thieves don’t have scruples.”
“Perhaps he wanted to leave you something to drown your sorrows with.”
“Or perhaps he wasn’t after items, but information.”
“Ah. And does the nurse have any?”
“None that I can imagine interesting anyone. Though, of course, who knows what that lot might find interesting.”
“But Kate,” he said. “You have to think how it looks to them.”
“Do I? Why?”
“You do seem to have an attraction to trouble. Those men back there, or that time you came to my rooms. If my landlady had found out . . .”
“She didn’t, did she? And if I were nefarious, I’d hardly be looking for trouble, would I?”
He didn’t answer. The real question he wanted to ask was why she’d shown up at his apartment so soon after he’d been to White City. Checking to see if he was transmitting to Germany? But of course he couldn’t. And before he could formulate another question, Kate turned in the seat to face him.
“Don’t you see how it is?” she said. “With the Germans suspecting I work for the English, and the English suspecting I work for the Germans? I don’t want to live my life worried what will happen. I did that for far too long, so now, who cares? Arrest me, if it makes them happier. Otherwise leave me alone.”
A very convincing performance. Time to push, he thought. “It’s natural, Kate. It happened to me at the beginning of the war, and for them, this is the beginning of the war with you.”
“Who’s them?” she said.
He shrugged. “Whoever you think is looking for information. The Hamburg trip,” he said. Bertram had brought it up, and here his doubts had stuck. If Kate was a spy, what better way to ensure Claus’s loyalty to Germany than to prey on his feelings for his mother’s family?
“Yes?” she said.
“Was it hard to arrange?”
She was gazing at the passing fields of rape. Her reflection in the window looked yellow, haggard. “Define hard.”
“Did you need passes? Special ones, since it had been destroyed?”
“Of course. One can’t just travel about Germany. Especially a foreigner. Especially to high-security zones.”
“Yet you were able to.”
“I had family there.”
“And friends who were German.”
She shifted away from him. “Yes. Are these questions from your ‘higher-ups’?”
“No,” he said. It wouldn’t do to have her wary. “If people suspect you, that’s exactly the kind of thing they’d look for. But my questions are for my movie.”
“But how?” she said. “Your character is moving around France, not Germany.”
“True. Though in the immediate aftermath of liberation, it will perhaps not be much different. People suspicious of every new person.”
“That’s not restricted to war zones, believe me.”
He lifted one hand off the wheel and stared at the speedometer and gas gauge, seeing neither, contemplating his next move.
“Sylvie,” he said, after a small silence.
“What about her?”
“Nice of her to take your shift. But I thought you were angry with her.”
“I can’t like everyone I work with, Claus. You don’t either. Herbert.” She sighed and moved her purse between them. “There are times it comes in handy, when it means I’m free to do other things. Like today.”
He suspected she was beginning to regret having done so; her voice was flat. For a mile or two they were silent. A cloud shadow raced beside them up a hill; more clouds were coming from the south. When the shadow reached the top, Kate said, “Do you know what’s worst of all? That you doubt me.”
Part of him was glad he hadn’t fooled her. “I don’t doubt you, Kate.”
She laughed and said, “Of course not. You didn’t do that to my apartment, did you?”
He recognized the move, one he’d made in difficult situations. If you feared the answer, you couched the question as a joke. The wrong reply could be passed off as unimportant, to the other, if not to yourself.
“Kate,” he said. “My God.” He was going to say more but stopped. The first rule of good acting: know when enough is enough. He saw himself from the director’s chair, adjusted his body language, stiffened his jaw but didn’t shake his head. Kept his eyes straight ahead, feigning anger, rather than checking to see if she believed him, and he got the result he wanted.
“Sorry,” she said, and rested her hand on his forearm. “I’m just so sick of it.”
After an appropriate pause, he said, “It’s all right.”
She seemed immeasurably sad. He wanted to believe that she was. On a distant hill the Caterham spires stood out, houses and stores hard up against the church, and abruptly he turned on a side road.
“What’s this?” she said, her hand on the dashboard for balance.
“Our destination.” The car bumped up the dirt track, the tall humped grass in the middle sweeping against the undercarriage. “Time to enjoy ourselves.”
They passed an old mill with the millrace still running though the wheel had long since fallen apart; four stone houses and a stone church; a farm with a few horses, three dirty sheep, and a single gaunt cow. The unused road ran on. When the farm was out of sight, Claus pulled aside in the longer grass, bumped over a hidden rock, then turned off the engine.
“Why did you close your eyes?” she said.
“Prayer,” he said. “Never sure it’ll work again. And relief. Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The countryside.”
She opened the squeaking door and listened. The wind pushing through the tall trees like a river, crickets, a dog barking in the distance. She sat looking out over the blue oats bending in the wind, the green mass of the woods. “Yes,” she said at last. “You were right to bring us here.”
They walked toward the brow of the hill, Claus holding the hamper, Kate a blanket. They didn’t talk. A squadron of fighters passed low overhead, rattling the plates in the hamper, and Claus began spreading out the blanket. “Can’t that wait?” she said.
“I’m in no rush,” he said. “I just like to set things up beforehand.”
“All right.” She opened the hamper and swore. “The dirty bugger!”
“Someone shortchange you?”
“The bastard Home Guard. He took our cider!”
Claus laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“The brave and loyal Home Guard.”
“Given the shortages, a little stealing is all right,” Kate said. “My landlord pinches a slice of bread every other day. But this is too much. He didn’t have to take both bottles. I’ve a mind to report him.”
Claus reached into the hamper. “Let’s see. Bananas, cucumber salad, cream cheese–stuffed tomatoes, Scotch eggs, and some cheese. Looks like Hereford. Am I right?”
She n
odded and sat.
“And what’s this?” He pushed aside the cloth cover to reveal three pigeon feet poking from a pie crust. “Pigeon pie, is it? He didn’t take that much.”
“I suppose you’re right. If he’d been a true bastard he’d have confiscated the lot.”
“And it’s a lot to confiscate. I got you at just the right time. And to think you almost didn’t come.”
“No,” she said, plucking the warm grass beside her. “I was going to from the moment you asked. You’ll think me foolish when I tell you why, but I had this odd fancy. Whoever broke in took some of my journals too. I found myself rereading remaining ones from the last war, passages about the soldiers and doctors I served with, some of my patients. And except for Horst, when I tried to recall their faces, I couldn’t. They’d blurred into nothingness, as if I were looking at them under moving water, and since I wanted to see a face, I closed my eyes and concentrated and they floated to the surface and were borne away, just as I was about to see them clearly.” She stopped and raised a hand, palm up, letting the grass fall out, as a sign of her difficulty.
“And what?” Claus said, leaning closer.
“And at last I did see a face, attached to name after name, but each time it was yours.” She laughed. “You see, it’s absurd! But since it was you I kept seeing, I supposed that it was you I should see. And so here I am.”
The plates clattered in his hands. Kate looked at him.
“You’ll need to take another break from your duties,” she said. “It’ll only get worse if you don’t. I’ve seen it happen. A surgeon on the ward killed someone that way last week. His scalpel nicked a subclavian artery. The poor boy bled to death before we could stop it.”
“Good thing I’m not operating then, isn’t it?”
“Claus.” She grabbed his wrist. “It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you need to stop.”
“I wish I could,” he said.
She lay with her head in his lap, face turned to the sky, which was beginning to cloud up. In the distance a train whistle sounded, the engine smoke a jagged black smudge against the blue horizon. In this position, the bruises on her neck were just visible. He slid his fingers under her collar and pressed lightly.
“Ouch,” she said.
“Sorry. Forgot.”
He moved his hands a bit lower, kept them there. The truth was he’d wanted to see if they were real. He felt guilty for doubting her, yet even so doubted her about other things, if not the bruises.
“I’ve been thinking about your movie,” she said.
“The train scene?”
“The woman’s dilemma. You know, it’s rather easy to turn your back on a German military band marching down the Champs Élysées, but what if it’s some small German boys’ choir singing at Notre Dame, or the Lyon symphony playing Bach, or a book on imperial German gardens? Is paying for any of those collaboration? Have her struggle with that. The French will understand.
“And the war hasn’t been bad for everyone.” She recrossed her ankles. “You should see what’s become of farmhouses. Indoor plumbing, pianos, fur coats, stained-glass windows, and even then they can’t spend all they’ve made from their black-market successes. You’ll want to work some of that in too.”
“Now you sound pro-German.”
“No. The farmers don’t have it easy either. The Germans have already begun on them, burning their beehives, confiscating their seeds. And when boys write anti-German slogans on stone walls with tar, the local dairy farmers have all their milk requisitioned and the boys are made to churn it into butter. Then they clean the walls with it. Intentionally galling, you see, all that butter, all that labor, all that waste.”
“Anti-German, too,” he said, and shook his head. “You’re a mess.”
He’d meant it as a joke but she said, “Yes, I think so. Nationality means nothing, less than nothing. It’s a disaster, if you ask me.”
He smoothed her hair. Was she simply trying to disarm him? “What’s brought this on?”
“This,” she said. She sat up and faced him. “This picnic.”
“You don’t like it?”
“No. Yes. I love it.” She shook her head. “I’m happy, but that’s just it, you see. I can’t stop thinking of France.” She tore up stems of clover and rubbed them between her fingers, discarding them only to start over again. A car drove over a distant ridge, dust trailing up behind it. Its straining engine note reached them. “I hated watching what the Germans did to the Jews. Rounding them up, shipping them off, the rumors of their murders. But it started before that, immediately after the Germans came to France. The very next day the Jews were forced to clean the German soldiers’ toilets and sweep the streets. The daily humiliation was horrifying, sickening to watch, and yet I did nothing.”
He touched her wrist. “I know, Kate. I saw it in Germany. People tried to cover their Stars of David with newspapers on trams, and with their briefcases or purses when they walked. Looking at them made me feel as if I’d decreed they wear them myself, so I turned away, but of course that probably just made them think I despised them.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have to see it done to nurses you worked with, and then to realize that your having said nothing earlier meant that their being arrested later was easier. It didn’t matter that I’d remained quiet because I’d feared making their lives worse. That I hadn’t protested in the first place meant that I couldn’t in the end.”
“But I don’t see the connection.”
She laughed without humor. “It’s that that wasn’t what made me leave.”
He shook his head, puzzled.
“Before I left, I kept noticing the German boots. New and noisy. Real leather. And all the parcels their soldiers carried. I knew what was coming, the deprivation. Not for the Germans, but for the rest of us. I’d seen it before. I’d started to live through it again this time and I knew it was only going to get worse. I’m sure it has. In preparation for the invasion, the French had started to rebel, minor things mostly, like burning fields of rape, but of course that didn’t do anything to the Germans. What did they care? They had butter and they simply cut back on the margarine rations, which hit hardest those who could least afford the blows—the old, the young.
“The senseless deaths, the horrible hunger, the messages written on hotel walls for lost family members, those were all ahead of me. I’m afraid I didn’t have sufficient courage to face that again. That decided me.” She laughed again, more quietly. “So here I am, enjoying my picnic with you. If the wages of sin are death, the rewards of cowardice are much better.”
She couldn’t be acting. It seemed impossible. He looked away. “It’s common sense, Kate, not cowardice. No one would go through it willingly.”
“Perhaps not, but not everyone would have run away either. I wouldn’t have, younger.”
“Younger, you didn’t know all you’d have to endure.” It was a comfort to try and comfort her, to steer her through her doubts. It made his less forceful. But as soon as he thought that, she seemed the mirror of his own deception, and his thoughts turned black.
She shook her head. “I’m just tired of it.”
“As am I.”
“Are you, Claus? Really?”
“Of course.”
She twirled the long grass around her forefinger, pulled some free and let it loose on the wind. “It’s just that there’s so much about you I can’t figure out. Your secret code at the dog track and your refusal to tell Max the truth. It feels as if you’re hiding things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like the radio. You were going to tell me about it. What did you mean?”
He shrugged to mask his surprise. “It’s German. I’ve been suspected because of it. I wanted you to know the things I’ve been through, why I collect that information and pass it on. I’ve felt coerced into it for a long time.”
“I can imagine.”
“Can you?”
“Yes, of course. I
lived under it in France, after all.”
“And did you report to the Germans?”
“God, no. Or not in that sense. I worked for them, in hospitals, so yes, but I never told them anything.”
“So how can you say you understand? It’s not the same.”
“Because nothing is ever simple, and because each of us makes deals with our own consciences. Yours must have made sense to you at one point, even if it no longer does.”
He felt judged, and unfairly so, since she didn’t know everything, but of course that was his fault. And he’d been guilty of judging her. It was a brilliant move, to cast doubt on him, a neat reversal, one that would take much time to undo. A flight of planes came from the south, shaking the ground, the same ones that had flown earlier toward France it seemed, probably a raid on Calais. Was it his imagination or were there fewer this time?
He was about to speak when she stood and slapped grass from her skirt.
“How about a little exploration?” she said.
“Oh?” he said, and raised an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”
She laughed. “Not that.”
“I’d rather not,” Claus said. “I like it here.”
“Oh, please,” she said, and held out her hand. “Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud. You brought me all the way out here, after all. Don’t you think you should indulge me?”
He laughed and shook his head.
“Fine.” She turned. “You’ll have to catch me then if you want to bring me back.”
She was halfway up the hill when he started after her, and he’d just about caught up when she stopped abruptly below an old stone wall nearly hidden in the tall grass.
“Oh, Claus, look. We’ll pretend it’s Hadrian’s Wall and everything beyond it is unknown land. Wild. We’ll make it our own.”
Kate ran her hand over the stones as they walked. Beyond the wall, fields of wildflowers stretched toward a creek-fed pond, two worn wooden benches to one side. Buttercups and dwarf daisies spilling down the far bank, purple myrtle nearer, the scent of wild onions on the wind.