I, however, felt myself go into a cold sweat. This would surely be the test of the basement’s soundproofing. There was no way of knowing whether or not Miss O’Brien had heard Cordoba’s knocking at the front door, or his calling to me. I doubted if it would be a very profitable night for me at cards, with my mind continually going back downstairs to Miss O’Brien rather than at the card table with Cordoba. I apologized profusely that I had forgotten the card night, for I had also neglected to prepare anything for dinner. Usually Cordoba and I have fish—either fresh or frozen—that I have caught. He supplies the wine, which I now saw in his hand. I would have to throw something together from tins, and I detest doing that. It affronts my sensibilities, and moreover, it reminds me of the hard years toward the end of the war. Rather absurd, living in this land of infinite bounty, that one should ever be forced to consume food from a jar or tin. But there it is. No choice. This sudden realization also brought me up short vis-à-vis my relations with Miss O’Brien. Was I not perhaps becoming overly involved, even to the point of forgetting the all-important monthly card game? Surely such absorption in another was unhealthy. But I had no time to pursue this avenue of self-inquiry. I had to get inside, freshen up, and throw something together for dinner.
First, I made Cordoba a bracing drink—he enjoys martinis. I believe he acquired the taste through seeing American movies, and as I have no idea of how to make them other than from information supplied from the same source, we make a perfect match. I prepared a large shaker of the stuff and left it at his side in the living room—he was seated happily in one of the large armchairs, the national paper in his lap.
I went off to the shower. Hurrying with my toilet, I put on white ducks, espadrilles, and a fresh polo shirt (we keep the evenings casual but festive) and began bustling about in the kitchen. Cordoba did not bother with conversation as long as I was in the kitchen. He never does. Quite content with his martini and paper, he sat quietly in the living room as I concocted a tuna soufflé with asparagus au gratin on the side. The tuna I had put up myself, but the flavor is never so rich as that fresh or freshly frozen. He tolerated it, however; Cordoba was even quite flattering of my culinary skills as we sat down to dinner finally. The bottle of Moselle he brought, by now chilled, went quite well with the dish. All in all, the dinner was fine and put both of us in a good humor for cards. Cordoba cleaned the dishes as is the usual custom, and I set out the green felt cloth and readied the cards and plastic chips.
After many years of vacillating, we have finally settled on gin rummy as our preferred game. For some months, we toyed with Brazilian canasta, basically a free-for-all of canasta in which rules are stood on their head as all else is in that immense, confused country. But, in the end, this suited neither of us. Gin rummy, on the other hand, was fast enough and demanded only a modicum of concentration so that I could get down to the real task of the evening: listening and reacting to Cordoba’s lode of local gossip.
A quick bit of background on Cordoba: We would seem, at first sight, to make an unlikely duo. But our connection is quite logical, for Cordoba is not just some backwoods rustic. His father was this country’s ambassador to Berlin during the war. Cordoba was, in fact, born in Germany and spent his first ten years of life there. He still speaks the rough Berlin dialect that he picked up from the gardeners and servants at his father’s embassy.
The way Cordoba tells it, he spent a hurdy-gurdy childhood given free run of the place. His mother had died in childbirth and his father was much too busy with official business to tend to his young son. After the war, Cordoba’s father went out of favor with his government at home; he had been away so long that his domestic power base had eroded. He retired to this sleepy village where he spent the rest of his life drinking Mexican brandy and writing memoirs that never took form. And again, Cordoba was left to fend for himself. He is a man of independent means, though of a very limited amount, I understand. A poet as well, he composes tight little verses of an incredibly scatological nature, which he sometimes favors me with, waiting expectantly for the punch line to sink in. Though he invariably breaks into his snorting giggle before I have had time to register my disgust.
One other thing about Cordoba: He knows my secret. He has some pull in rightist camps of Latin America because of his father’s reputation as a Nazi sympathizer. Thus, he is my contact man with the various generals who have employed me from time to time in the difficult years this nation experienced with the left-wing insurgents.
At any rate, this explains somewhat my connection with Cordoba: It was partly a matter of sentiment, for we could speak German together; and partly a matter of business. And then there was also the gossip. It could take so many interesting turns. Tonight, however, I was surprised to discover that I was the chief topic of local gossip. Such had not been the case for many years.
“In town, they say you’re in love.”
The cards slapped the table as Cordoba dealt.
“—”
“I thought not. Told them they were full of tomatoes. It’s the girl. They say you collected her things from the hotel. Some cock-and-bull story about her having to leave the country on account of illness. But there’s no record of her leaving, you see. They say maybe she’s living here with you. I hope that was not her grave you were digging out back.”
He snorts a laugh.
“They say a lot of things.”
“Yes, my friend. But I, of course, educated them. I told them Señor ____ was beyond such things as amour. That he only longs for the peace and quiet necessary to finish his memoirs. And that women, as any hombre can tell you, do not allow such a pretty condition to come about. Quiet frightens them. Peace they think of only as the absence of war. No, I told them, no one would wish love on Señor ____. He has no need of it. I, on the other hand …”
“Just what is it you want to know, Cordoba?”
“There have been inquiries, my friend. The local police have heard from certain parties in the United States, from some literary woman or such. A writer’s agent, I believe it was. One cannot, regardless of our lax judiciary here, simply disappear another. Not even you, connected howsoever tenuously with the police as you are. Disappearances are their prerogative. In their eyes, you have overstepped your power. They suspect you of having gotten the woman out of the way in one manner or another—and possibly for very good reasons. That is not the question. The question, the problem, is that they would rather you come to them about such matters. … Bad play, friend. I’m collecting aces, remember? Gin. … I suppose they would like to be reassured about this.”
“She’s a guest here. Downstairs. She’s writing a novel that is set here. I am giving her a place to work. That is all.”
“You sly dog. Is that really all? I remember my father, old as he was, could still get up to tricks if he had enough brandy in him. Enough only; too much and he was like a flower needing water.”
“She is a writer. I am playing the part of patron. That is all there is to it.”
“Well, we should have her up. A third at cards would be great fun. Do fetch her.”
“She does not want to socialize. She works most of the time. Seems she is at a dramatic point now. I even hesitate to flush the toilet lest it will throw her concentration off.”
“You sly old dog.”
“I assure you, Cordoba …”
“No. No explanations are needed. I get the lay of the land.”
“And your friends?”
“I imagine they will understand, as well. Tell her to get in touch with this agent though, will you? She is causing a low-level stink. It irritates certain people who should not be irritated.”
When Cordoba finally left, I remembered that I had not yet fed Miss O’Brien. Immediately, she sensed there was something amiss. She had heard more footsteps overhead than usual; she was curious, inquisitive. But I had no mood for talking tonight. I simply left the remains of
our meal and departed, her questions floating in the air.
Now the complications begin, I thought. As they always do. I will have to do something about this agent and her questions. I cannot afford to irritate Cordoba’s friends. I cannot afford to appear ungrateful for their patronage over the years. Complications.
I will put them out of my mind for the time, however. Get back to work on my memoirs.
I sit alone writing now. One lamp only is on upstairs, the green-shaded brass lamp on my trestle table. The room is suffused with soft warm light. Silence like a palpable force emanates from the ravine in back.
We were married that summer, Uschi and I. After our honeymoon—a bike ride through the Wachau, gaping at the terraced vineyards sloping into the sluggish Danube; nights spent at simple inns along the route—I went straight to the Staffel cadet training school at Bernau, just northeast of Berlin. This was my first trip outside of Austria. A strange lightness in my soul manifested itself as our train crossed the former border at Passau. I stress the fact that it was a “former border crossing”: For the past year and a half, the Anschluss had made the destinies of Germany and Austria inseparable.
The summer of ’39 was one of those apocryphal ones weather-wise. It depends now on which account, whose memoirs you read, whether it was the driest of the century or the wettest. Not even the official meteorological records agree on this point. It is certain that it was much drier and warmer in Germany and on the continent in general than in England.
I remember that day on the train quite clearly. It was only mid-July, but already the first crop of hay was ricked and drying under the hot sun. I shared my compartment with a young boy sitting opposite me. Though only a few years separated us, I looked upon him as a boy. He was continually remarking on the earliness of the crop; I remember that distinctly. His father was a dairy farmer in Styria and he complained jokingly of the burden his “defection” to the Staffel was causing his father—“the old man,” he called him. He made sure to lay on the irony thickly with the word defection, as he had no inkling whether I would be sympathetic to such a case or not. In the event, he was right to do so. Association with the Staffel was not only a high honor, it was also voluntary. From my initial self-serving motives for joining up, I had already progressed to a reverence, a feeling of being among the select, the chosen. It was apparent to me, however, that this young peasant had joined the Staffel simply to avoid inevitable general conscription into the Wehrmacht. He had taken advantage of the new push in Staffel circles to “leaven” the loaf with other strata of society. The old aristocracy and the technocracy of specialists and university graduates had for a time controlled the Black Corps. I was later to learn that certain people in Berlin were growing nervous about this state-within-a-state organization and that doors had been opened wider to make us a touch less elitist. If this cunning little farmer’s son were any indication of the new direction of the corps, then I feared I had made a grave error in joining.
At any rate, it was fortunate the lout tempered his remarks with irony. Had he not, I would have reported him immediately upon arrival at Bernau. Which could have come none too soon, I can assure you. I’d had enough of this peasant’s rough humor and looked forward to mixing with men more of my own kind.
Once in Bernau, then, you can imagine my fright when I discovered that the quartermaster was lining us up for accommodation assignments according to order of arrival! I felt an absolute panic: It was bad enough that coincidence had forced me to share a compartment with the loutish youth, but now it looked as though the same coincidence should determine that I share bunk space with him, too. With this Cro-Magnon whose feet most likely smelled of an old barn.
The youth obviously read my discomfort standing in line next to him, fated to be his roommate, for he tapped my arm gently just as I was about to protest to the quartermaster.
“Good luck for me. I’ll learn some city manners now.”
His ruddy face beamed quite honestly at me, his mouth smiling in a wide arc. He winked and then I knew that he knew, and it made everything all right for me. A small thing, you may say, to make a fellow human being more comfortable by demonstrating understanding and tact. But it was the unexpectedness of the action, the completely sincere manner in which he did it, that was so disarming. Suddenly, this rough youth’s features lost their rawness in my eyes. He began to take on the virile blond good looks of the propaganda posters.
“Yes,” I finally replied to his overture. “I’m sure we’ll get on just fine.”
And, in fact, we did. Hannes was his name. Hannes Friedl, though we all called him Kuh—Cow—after his father’s occupation, and also because he forever seemed to be chewing on something.
As it turned out, Cow embodied the philosophy of stoic separation. He never articulated this—he could not have. There was not a reflective bone in his body. But after getting to know him, one sensed in him an inviolate spirit, an apartness. He was not aloof. That is something quite different, quite self-conscious. Cow was always friendly and cordial, though lacking in the social grace and awareness of true cordiality. But he was a natural leader: never one to be dominated by sex or emotion. Not cold, merely complete unto himself.
We were an unlikely duo: he, a burly, tousle-haired blond youth with hands that looked as if they had been invented to fit around teats, and I, a thin, rather ascetic-looking intellectual type, right down to my round tortoiseshell glasses and brown hair combed straight back off the forehead. Yet we formed a bond. He was sincere in wanting to learn the ways of the metropolis from me, calling me “Scholar” and always after me to educate him about which fork he should begin with or the proper forms of greetings for one’s superiors, or to tell him, one more time, about the glorious role of Austria in the Reich. Such gifts I thought paltry in relation to those I secured from him: the secret of positioning one’s body on the horizontal bar to accomplish the requisite twenty chin-ups (it is in the shoulders and hips, strangely enough, not in the arms; one must thrust upward with a totally flexed body); or the equally arcane technique of goose-stepping (again, the movement is from the hips and is so called, Cow assured us all, because if done correctly you will surely goose the soldier in front of you with the toe of your boot).
Over both these activities, Cow spent many predawn hours with me. It was Cow who prodded me when my spirits and physical stamina flagged; he had energy enough for an entire platoon. Indeed, he was earmarked early on for leadership, if only in the lower echelons, as his peasant background and lack of formal education played against him for the higher officer ranks. In return for an accomplished goose step, I schooled him in a refined cursive signature rather than the half-printed scrawl he placed on all his forms and applications.
Of course, not all the recruits saw Cow as I did. Some, not many, whether out of jealousy or ignorance, called him Cow not out of affection, but to hurt him. They made rude jokes about how his hands had actually gotten so calloused: not from handling udders, but from self-abuse. There was even some repugnant gossip about my friendship with him, allegations, of the humorless joking sort, that I rarely slept in my lower bunk alone. It is true that during a freak electrical storm Cow woke me. Thunder was the one thing that frightened him it seemed, and he was actually terrified that night. He asked—begged, actually—if he could sit on the end of my bunk for a time, and, of course, I answered in the affirmative. I tried to comfort him for a while, telling him of my own great fear of snakes, and that seemed to help. The next either of us knew, it was morning. We had fallen asleep in the bunk together, sleeping head to toe. His feet did not, I was pleased to discover, smell of musty barns, but rather of strong lye soap. A rugged, manly scent. One of the other cadets discovered us in the bunk together, hence the stories. But we ignored them and became even better friends because of them.
Thus it was for the first few weeks of training: drill, drill, and more drill. Harder for me, soft from city living, than for Cow, w
hose body had been hardened by physical labor. Soon, however, I came alive physically and began to feel that sweet self-power that comes with muscle tone; to enjoy a bounce in my walk and the pull and flex of muscle under my uniform.
In the fourth week of training, a special envoy came from Berlin, Schutzstaffel: Oberführer Heinz Jost, one of the top men in the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security service and intelligence agency of the Staffel and the Nazi Party, and Heydrich’s right-hand man. He came to gather volunteers for a special mission and did not have to ask us assembled cadets twice before Cow jerked his hand heavenward, forcing mine up with his other hand.
We were the first to volunteer for “Operation Himmler,” as the action came to be known in the history books.
Our names were called by Prokop, our drill instructor, a man who had been heavily decorated in the first war. He was real army, and from the outset, he had made it clear to us cadets that what he was creating was “an elite corps, not a corps of elitists.” It was the only bit of wordplay I ever heard Prokop indulge in. He and Cow hit it off famously, both taciturn to the extreme; they could sit over a beer for half an hour without exchanging a word.
It was only when I heard Scharführer Prokop boom out my name that I realized what had happened. I had become a volunteer. This was very unlike me, but later Cow reassured me: “This is no time for faint hearts or second-guessing. Wonderful things are afoot, Scholar. Careers will be made. Now is the day of opportunity. You have all the rest of your life to lie low.”
If only he had known how prophetic his words were to be!
“Aren’t you going to tell me who your visitor was last night?”
“Card night. An old friend.”
“The taxi man, then. He told me about your card nights when he was driving me out here that Sunday. Who won?”
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