The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  “The barbarians are gardeners,” Claus said.

  “Yes. Quite the landscapers, aren’t they? Well, let’s see how it looks up close.” She climbed up on the wall.

  “No.” Claus tried to tug her back. “Let’s not. Let’s stay here.” He was standing shin-deep in a drift of leaves, thick as in the fall but healthy and green. From a buzz-bomb blast, which couldn’t have been far off. He needed to ask her more questions, though he hadn’t decided which ones.

  “Oh, do come,” she said, pulling her hand free. “Let’s not let a few benches stop our adventure. Please, Claus?”

  Before he could respond she jumped down on the far side and began splitting the tall grass like a ship the sea. A hundred yards distant was a farmhouse with green shutters and a red roof. “It looks like something from a fairy tale,” Kate said. “It’s deserted. Let’s go look at it, shall we?”

  It wasn’t deserted; it had animals. “If you think it’s deserted, you don’t know farms,” Claus said.

  “And if you think we can just wander about without their permission, then you don’t know the English. They’ll think we’re after chickens and you’re liable to get a backside full of buckshot if we don’t.”

  “But I don’t want to wander about. I want to go back. We have to leave before long.” Her shift at the hospital, his as a warden, another scheduled broadcast. And he hadn’t figured her out yet.

  “Please? It’s the only thing I’ve asked.”

  He blew out a heavy breath. “All right. You go in. I’ll wait at the gate.”

  But the gate was open, an old woman standing by it with two stoneware bottles in her hands, as if she’d expected them.

  She had, it turned out; the dogs had been barking, and Peter was snorting up a storm.

  “Peter?” Kate said.

  “He’s in the garden, that one.” She turned to lead the way. “Mind him. Sometimes he doesn’t take to strangers. My name’s Helen.” She said the dogs were safe inside the house.

  The garden turned out to be a small graveled patch bordered by boxwood, Peter a pig who looked about to charge when he saw Claus. Helen bent and cupped his shoulder with one hand. “Now, Peter. That’s enough.” When he sat on his hind legs she produced a withered apple from her apron pocket, after which he climbed onto a small deck chair.

  “Likes to sun himself,” Helen said. “He’ll be fine now.” She turned to them. “Now what about you two? Tell me all about yourselves and what you’re doing here.”

  “A picnic,” Claus said. “We just wanted to be sure you didn’t mind.”

  “Mind? It’s nice to have people about. In fact, I was going to bring you these.” The bottles clinked together when she held them out. “But Peter wouldn’t let me go on my own and I was afraid he’d bite your ankles. Here,” she said, and handed them each one. “My own ginger beer. Enjoy.”

  Kate unwired the cork and opened it. The fizzing soda tickled her nose and she sneezed and giggled, and Claus caught a glimpse of the happy child she must have been. They both tasted it.

  “Rhubarb!” Kate said. “Just as our cook used to make it! Are you Welsh?”

  “No, dear. Born and bred on this very farm. Is it how the Welsh do?”

  “Ours did,” Kate said, and drank some more before giving a contented sigh. “My, how delicious. And look at your tomatoes. I have to stand in queues for hours to get any, and when I do, they don’t look like that. Write down this location,” she said, and winked at Claus. “We’ll have to come back and pinch some.”

  “No need for that,” Helen said. “I’ll give you some before you go.”

  Her curiosity wasn’t easily slaked, though she seemed most interested in Kate’s affairs, her time in France. She wanted to know what it was like to live under the Germans. “I was sure they were going to come, you see.”

  Kate told her a few small details—that tram seats next to Germans were always unoccupied, and that the French had become adept at letting lit cigarettes fall on German laps. “So adept that by the end of ’42 smoking was no longer allowed on trains.”

  They sat on a bench, and Peter watched them talk, his head bobbing back and forth as if the conversation were an especially fascinating tennis match, and Claus noticed the displaced gutter, the hanging shutter, the crumbling garden wall that meant there was work to be done on the farm and no man to do it. It made him want to leave all the more quickly, but Kate seemed settled in for a long talk.

  He watched Helen’s pleasure as Kate told her about a recipe with lingonberries she’d loved in Germany years before, and the thought came to him: What would an elderly woman in the country do for Kate if Kate was a spy? Nothing, he realized, not a thing. Bertram was wrong, it was as simple as that. Her kindness was entirely unfeigned.

  He felt as if he was able to breathe again, as if a too tight wrap had been removed from around his ribs. Kate seemed to sense it too, reaching out and taking his hand.

  Helen suggested she get her Victrola. “We could have some music. I’d turn on the wireless but it’s stopped working.”

  “Could you fix it, Charles? You’re good with mechanical things, aren’t you?”

  Was she alluding to her radio, which he’d so skillfully ruined? Did she suspect him of that? Impossible; her look was entirely ingenuous. It infuriated him how Bertram lurked in every corner, but he couldn’t let on. “Cameras I can do. But I’m worthless with radios.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, dropping Claus’s hand as she stood. “And even if he could, I’m afraid I shouldn’t have suggested it. We can’t linger. It’s time we were off. Past time, really. I have work tonight, in London”

  “That far off,” Helen said, as if it were hundreds of miles. “Can’t you miss it, dear?” The depth of her loneliness was apparent in her suddenly moist eyes. She reminded him of Winifred. “I’ve got stew almost ready. A bit small for the three of us, but with a salad I think we could make do.”

  She removed the lid from a small wooden box nearby, revealing two clay pots nested in hay.

  Kate picked up the overstuffed pillow that had been beneath the lid. “What’s this?” she said.

  “A hay box,” Claus said, involuntarily. “My mother used one for porridge and stew. The food cooks in the hay and needs only a bit of warming in the oven to finish it.”

  “How smart you are!” Kate said. “I’d never have guessed it.”

  He recognized Helen’s smile, the same one his mother had offered whenever astonished city people commented on farmers’ surprising intelligence.

  Kate stood. “Well, Helen. I’m afraid we can’t stay. But I would like to come back. Your place is absolutely restorative.”

  “All right, dear,” Helen said, and turned away to dab an eye. “But please make it soon. And when you do come, make enough noise for me to hear you too. Even though he knows you now, I can’t guarantee Peter’s reception.”

  Most of the ride back to the city they were quiet, Kate palming Helen’s tomatoes, Claus speeding to make time. The sky had turned quickly gray, and thunder began to sound the closer they came to the city, over which clouds hung low like a pall, like the smoke from fires during the Blitz. At last Kate shifted the tomatoes from one hand to the other. “I’ll cook you something with these you’ll like,” she said. “Tomato soup. It needs yogurt.”

  “I can get that,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Herbert.”

  She looked out the window at the remains of a windmill. “You should probably stay away from him, don’t you think? His lot only ever bring trouble.”

  He felt judged again but he didn’t have a ready reply, so they rode in silence the rest of the way. He wanted to tell her what he’d felt when he was watching her talk with Helen, but he couldn’t figure out how to bring it up. The car seemed the wrong place for it. They joined the London road near Norbury, where two girls were playing ping pong against an alley wall, and passed under a windowsill with a pair of red boxing gloves beaded with rain hanging f
rom it. Water spumed up from the damp shiny pavement behind cars, and Piccadilly with its streaming traffic was slower going. White Horse Street was packed with pedestrians: mothers with their prams hurrying from the closing stores and soldiers looking for bargains in the side alleys before the rain turned hard. He pulled in front of her building just as it did, and they sat in the car listening to it drum on the roof, watching it blur the outlines of people and buildings as if melting them. Kate was looking at her building.

  “Trust me to make it on my own?” she said.

  He laughed. “Yes.”

  She turned to him. “Trust me?”

  Clever woman. No wonder Bertram suspected her—a woman with brains always terrified him. Madge had played the fool around him, and Bertram had never seemed to realize it was an act.

  “Of course.”

  “Then what was all that about earlier? Those questions.”

  “I was trying to figure out some things.”

  “About me?”

  “No. Me.”

  “You?” She paused. “And did you?”

  “I did.”

  She waited. Thunder sounded again, louder, and lightning flashed above them. “My,” she said. “Talkative. So I’ll ask. What did you figure out?”

  He touched her thigh. “Sorry.” How to say it? He should have trusted his instincts about her from the start. Bertram had told him that a good spy had a sixth sense about such things, but he wasn’t a spy, really, he was simply a man who’d twice been caught up in times when the forms of his ancestors cast a suspicious shadow over his life, a man who’d been trapped in that shadow by those who seemed to have the power to move both the steady sun and the inconstant moon. He wanted to come out from under that shadow, and this seemed to be all that Kate wanted too.

  The clock struck the hour, interrupting his thoughts. She turned up her wrist to look at her watch.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be able to come up.”

  “Too rushed?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She shook her head. “Sylvie’s shift, I have to take it. I promised.”

  He held up both hands, as if in surrender. “I understand.”

  “You’re not angry?”

  “No. I’ve work tonight too. Warden duties. I’ll be busy with them a few days.”

  “You need to rest, Claus. From either the MOI or as a warden. You’re exhausted.”

  “Everyone is.”

  “All right. I warned you.” She brightened. “I’ll be busy too. But Sunday morning, bright and early, you can stop by. I’ll make tea. And your favorite pancakes.”

  “I’d like that,” he said. He’d have to get more potatoes from somewhere, but this was a good sign. And it would give him a chance to think over how he was going to tell her.

  “Wheat with lemon juice,” she said, and opened the door to step out. The rain had lessened.

  “You!” he said. But he was happy. Teasing was the ultimate forgiveness.

  The air had a peculiar smoky scent, almost charred, like roasting chestnuts, and they both said at the same time, “Christmas.” It made them smile. He handed her the wicker hamper from the boot. “Do you want me to wait? Drive you?”

  “No. Thank you, though. I’ll bathe first. It’ll be a while.”

  “I don’t mind. I could sit by the tub.”

  She laughed and leaned in to kiss him. “Sweet, how you’re always thinking of me.”

  As she ran into her open doorway he called out again, “Sunday!”

  She smiled and waved and disappeared up the dark stairs.

  Crouched over his radio, Claus forced himself to concentrate, ratcheting the dial back and forth, zeroing in on the frequency. With the lightning and thunder it was harder than normal to pick up Hamburg, almost impossible to hear them at the usual volume. He turned it up ever so slightly and began keying his message. Weather first, a few rumors about Plymouth, and then the real material, times and locations of V-1 landings. It had taken him the better part of half an hour to decide how much to alter them—a little or a lot. Mr. Morgan was already done with his bath by the time Claus had settled on the latter, since small changes were probably meaningless, especially after this long, and if he could convince them that their telemetry had been thrown startlingly off they might adjust accordingly. A big leap, but it would put many more of the V-1s in the country. Helen. Well, the odds were long that any would land near her, odds he was willing to take. At last. All his sparkling reasons for not having done it before couldn’t hide the fact that he’d been scared of the consequences.

  When he switched to receive he got a request to repeat the last part of his message. The coordinates hadn’t gone through evidently, or they were decoding as he tapped out the message and someone in Germany was stunned by how far off the landings were. Normally he wouldn’t repeat during a broadcast, but he decided in this case it was worth the risk.

  The floor creaked outside his door. Mrs. Dobson, spying on him? He wasn’t worried. He closed his eyes and concentrated, keying in the last of the information in exactly the same fashion one more time. He wasn’t going to make too many more broadcasts anyway, and if Bertram found out and it meant jail, that prospect wasn’t as terrifying as it once had been. They wouldn’t shoot him—not even Bertram was capable of that—and they couldn’t lock him up forever. The war was bound to end soon, now that the Allied troops had broken loose from Normandy. Herbert was betting that it would all be over by Christmas.

  August 4

  WHEN THE MATRON CALLED HER, Kate was on the ward, dressing the burned hands of an elderly woman. Each finger took several minutes, as they had to be done separately.

  “You have a visitor,” the matron said. “A man.” The matron’s admonishing look didn’t get a rise from Kate; she wasn’t about to apologize for someone coming to see her that she hadn’t asked to. Or perhaps it was the V-1s that made the matron snap; they seemed to be hitting now with greater frequency and that had everyone on edge. Kate continued to wrap the gauze as the matron turned on her white heels. “At the main entrance.”

  It had been a week since she’d seen Claus. He hadn’t returned her calls, though she’d left messages for him at the MOI, or if he had, it hadn’t been while she was home. She let him wait a few minutes while she checked her patient’s heels and hips for bedsores, wanting to do a thorough job and happy to hold, however briefly, the upper hand.

  “All set, Mrs. Bellers,” she said, and rolled her onto her back.

  Mrs. Bellers held up her bandaged hands. “Will they ever heal?”

  “They will,” she said, and squeezed her shin through the sheets. “Not as good as new, but you’ll be able to use them” She didn’t like to lie to patients.

  In the hallway were two men, one younger and taller, the other short, bow-tied, florid-faced, and jowly; he looked like someone she might see on the ward in a few years after he had a heart attack. They stood before a large, ornately framed mirror, a gift of some lord long ago, which Kate had tried several times to have moved—the burn ward was nearby, for God’s sake—but she’d been told it had been there forever and so it would remain. The younger man, almost boyish, was eyeing his reflection unobtrusively, and as she got closer he faced her completely and raised his hat, showing that the unfortunate orange coloring of some Celts, the freckled face and hands, extended to his hair, yet her eyes went to the other man. She’d lived through these interrogations before. He was making an effort to appear nonchalant, studying the upturned toe of one worn shoe as if he’d just noticed a spot on it, which only reinforced the notion that he was a big noise, and she had no doubt that he was the one in control. One of Horst’s favorite lines from Seneca sprang to mind. Et sceleratis sol oritur; “the sun shines even on the wicked.”

  “Mrs. Zweig?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Bertram Swales. I have something of yours.” From a leather satchel he took a bundle. She recognized immediately the pomegranate-colored calf-leather-bound jo
urnals.

  “You found them! Where?”

  He paused. “This is a bit difficult. Do you know a Charles Murphy?”

  “Claus? Yes.”

  “And his relationship to you?”

  “He’s . . .” She paused.

  “Nothing?”

  “No. Not at all. A friend. A good friend.”

  “Yes, you left a message for him at the MOI, didn’t you?”

  “Then you know I know him.”

  “He’s dead, I’m afraid.”

  “What, how?” Her devastation was such that at first she didn’t feel it. She seemed to have no body at all, to not be present in any corporeal sense, and then her legs grew enormously heavy and began to tremble. They were liquid, made of water, how did they hold her up? She felt like a building that somehow managed to stand though its foundation buckled.

  The intuition that Swales had planned this public announcement in order to gauge her response helped her gather herself; she made an effort not to show more. She decided not to sit, determined not to give him that satisfaction.

  “And those?” she said of the journals. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching for them. “What do they have to do with that?”

  He put them back in his satchel. “That’s the tricky part, I’m afraid. We think he was a spy. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  Her heart was beating rapidly, her face coloring, but she would not betray herself. Or Claus. She was careful not to speak until she was sure she could control her voice. “A spy? You’re mistaken. But ask away,” she said.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  It was a display case, filled with pipes.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Could you explain that?”

  “Yes. I’ve not seen them, but Claus told me about them. His collection, that is. Nothing about the box they were in. The pipes, how he found them, why he kept them.”

  “Claus? You’ve called him that twice. Did you know a lot about him?”