Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  They took us for a hike in the woods. My teeth were chattering, my arms were still shaking from the tension of holding the rock over my head. My boots were filled with cold water and made disgusting squishy sounds at every step. The hike went on for three hours; there was no time to change my clothes until right before dinner. I was too worn out to eat. After dinner, they sent me to a lady psychologist. “How are you bearing up? It must be hard.” She had soft-looking, manicured hands and was wearing a beautiful gold cuff bracelet. Her voice was so sweet, so decent. “Are you chilled? Would you like to borrow a sweater?” I said, I’m fine.

  But exhausted as I was each night, I could hardly fall asleep. I kept thinking too much. I’d called John at his office and told him I was going back to New York for a few weeks, to stay at my mother’s and put pressure on the real estate agent. I added, I had the phone disconnected, so if you want to reach me…He said, with great seriousness, I’ll talk to you when you get back. I said, If you want a divorce, you can tell me now. I won’t drop dead from shock. Linda, he said, please don’t make every conversation we have a confrontation. It’s not helping, you know.

  So I said, John, I’m not going to New York. They’re sending me to Assessment School.

  For Berlin? he breathed.

  Yes.

  How did you get Ed to go along?

  I guess Norman must have convinced him, I lied.

  Well, he said, I don’t know what to say. So I waited. Sooner or later, he’d have to say something. And he did: Um, if you’re planning on going in, maybe we should sit down first and, you know, talk things over.

  You don’t want me to go?

  Linda, I can’t make that kind of decision for you. It’s your life that would be at stake.

  And then I realized his talking things over meant: Hey, sweetie, if you’re going to die in Berlin, let’s be divorced so I don’t have to wait seven years—or whatever it was—in legal limbo before I can marry Nan. If you’re buried under forty tons of rubble or have a bullet in your head, I could be terribly inconvenienced.

  I understand, I said.

  Good, he said. We’ll sit down and talk soon.

  But what really kept me awake was the lie I’d told Norman Weekes. I’d said Edward was too cautious, but my unspoken words were: He’s weak. You’re brave, Norman. You’re not some lily-livered lawyer who worries about the sanctity of life. You have the guts to send men out to their death.

  I’d conned a weak man to get around a brave and strong one. I’d manipulated Norman to do what I’d wanted, and I’d turned my back on Edward Leland. Okay, he’d turned out to be a real crumb who’d sat back and let his daughter take over my husband and didn’t have the decency—the decency that comes with friendship—to give me a clue that could save my marriage, save everything I had. But I’d betrayed him far worse. I’d denied all his advice, all his wisdom, and, even more, all the good things he stood for. I’d gone over to his enemy to join the game of Cowboys and Indians.

  It was early September then, getting cold at night in the countryside, and they’d only given us a thin, and not very clean, army blanket. Probably another test to see if we were strong enough not to beg for a goose-down quilt. Maybe Edward was right, I thought, as I tucked the blanket under my feet. Maybe I am on some crazy suicide mission. Or maybe my heart is in the right place, but there’ll be a bullet in it two days after I get to Berlin. If I get to Berlin at all.

  I got one step closer. I passed the Stress Interview. I sat on a stool in a dark room with a spotlight glaring in my eyes. Three or four men screamed questions at me in German. Someone threw water in my face. Down the hallway, I heard a woman shrieking as if she was in agony.

  I passed. Easily. The Stress Interview was so close to my nightmares that I’d already lived through it a dozen times. “You’ve failed this test,” one of them taunted me at the end, his voice full of contempt. I sat still. I knew that had to be part of the test too. And I was right. The next day, they sent me to OSS Training School.

  The training school they sent me to was a compound of drab cinder-block buildings in West Virginia, the sort of place that probably once housed exploited coal miners, or reform school girls. The whole area was bleak. The ground was mostly gray gravel, and even the small patches of grass looked scraggly and unhealthy. There were no trees, and by afternoon you felt weak. There was no Indian summer here; just dusty heat and a glare that made your eyes burn.

  Everything was dry and half dead, except for inside the cinder-block buildings. Even after the hottest days, they were so damp at night that when I woke up from the few hours’ sleep I managed to get, my knees and neck and shoulders would ache, like a stiff old arthritic lady’s.

  I hadn’t planned on being the kind of spy who crawls around with a grenade between her teeth. I didn’t need this place. But go tell that to the OSS. Whether your cover was going to be third kitchen assistant, grinding out spaghetti for Mussolini’s mistress, or a dockworker in Le Havre, you had to take the Course.

  They put me into a class in close combat and gutter fighting—a subject I’d never anticipated studying in my days at Grover Cleveland High School. The instructor was a huge Marine with a head shaped like a canned ham. I thought he’d hate me, because when it came to giving a knee in the groin or a sideswipe to the Adam’s apple, I was his least able and least enthusiastic pupil. But at the end he took me aside and said, “Honey, you stink. So listen good. If you’re ever in a hand-to-hand situation, you got one choice. Stick your thumb in the guy’s eye. If you can’t get your thumb, use another finger. Go squoosh.” The best that could be said for the class was that it was the last physical effort I had to make.

  If you couldn’t crunch the skulls of four Gestapo guys with your bare hands, at least they expected you to be able to shoot them. “This veapon is the Walther P-38. It is the standard Wehrmacht pistol, und it replaced the Luger in 1938.” From his posture to the way he clipped off his native Bavarian accent, it was clear that our gun teacher (although we weren’t allowed to call the thing a gun) had spent most of his life in the German military. Four of us—me, an Italian guy from New York, and two college types with eyeglasses—stood on the firing range, holding our guns—pistols—while the teacher said, “You vill note the signal pin in the rear of the slide, vich vill enable you to both see und feel that there is a cartridge in the chamber.” He was all business. He didn’t even bother with the usual false name: no “Call me Hans.” And when I asked him a question about the safety catch in German, he gave me a dirty look, almost a hate-filled look, and answered me in English. When he taught us to dismantle the P-38, put it back together, and repair it by utilizing parts from other disabled weapons, there was no encouragement, no criticism, no nothing. Just Ja or No.

  That was the worst of the Training School. There was no camaraderie, no sense that you were working together with people for a cause, no high-spirited feeling of We’re gonna beat these bastards. No one had a name, not even a cover identity. It was a finger pointed, and someone said, “You.”

  “You,” they’d say, and shove the camera into your hand as they were teaching you to photograph secret documents. “You,” they’d bark, “who do you want to blow up—yourself or the Krauts?” when they taught us to handle explosives. I tried to explain to a man in a shirt and tie who seemed to be the administrator that no one had any plans for me to be blowing up bridges or derailing trains, that it was too funny to even think about; he just turned around and walked away.

  What I hated about the place was that it was so un-American. Every once in a while at Assessment School there’d been a friendly “Come on, stop complaining. We’ve all been through it” from the OSS men, or at least a couple of minutes of kidding around with the other recruits. But West Virginia was cold and hard and dead; it felt like Germany. Some nights, especially at the beginning, when I was all black and blue and upset—shaken up—from the close-combat class, I tried to cheer myself by saying, Maybe they’re really smart to make this
place such a lousy, miserable hole. It’ll get rid of the rah-rah types, the ones who see war as a giant Coney Island, with shooting ranges and rockets and parachute jumps as part of the fun.

  But other nights…like after the Scare House, where I’d been sent up a dark flight of stairs with my pistol and heard footsteps behind me, and threatening German voices off so low I couldn’t make out where they were or what they were saying, and then all of a sudden out popped a thing—a scarecrow in an SS uniform—and I had to turn fast and fire, and then, seconds later, at a door at the top of the stairs, I heard loud, guttural voices, and I had to reload, release the safety catch, kick open the door, then fire again…those nights I wondered what good all this was doing me. If I had to depend on my ability to reassemble a Walther P-38 or derail a train, I wasn’t going to get out of Berlin alive. I was so cold and so scared and, I guess worst of all, so lonely in this school with no names that I started to think: What am I doing here? Am I crazy? All the brilliant and devious plans I’d made for Berlin, all the clever reasons I’d found for them to send me in, didn’t make much sense after a day spent learning where to hide steel wool in a truck’s engine.

  But the wheel I’d put myself on was spinning too fast for me to stop it, and all I could do was hang on desperately to one of the spokes.

  After Training School was over, they drove me up to Baltimore. And as we passed Washington, I thought: This is crazy. I’m just going to tell them, “Stop the car! Let me out!” I laughed to myself. But by that time we were almost out of Washington, and I realized that my silent laugh hadn’t been high-spirited; it had been hysterical.

  In Baltimore, I spent a week living with an old couple in the second floor of a white-stooped brownstone in a slum. They called me Lina and I was told to call them Mr. and Mrs. Pohl, which was pretty much like calling them Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The Pohls’ only purpose was to drown me, smother me and choke me with berlinerisch. For fourteen to sixteen hours a day, the old bald man or his scrawny, washed-out wife carried on endless conversations with me and corrected my accent.

  In the berlinerisch dialect, g is pronounced like the English y (or the German j), so that ganz gut, the phrase for “okay,” sounds like yanz yoot. I managed “okay” okay, but after all those years of working for and living with John, sometimes I would slip and say something terrible like gestern ist er gekommen, “he came yesterday,” using the correct (but forbidden) hard g’s. Or I’d use the High German Ich, with its guttural sound, instead of the berlinerisch Ik, for the word “I.” Whenever I made a mistake, the old woman would put her hand to her forehead and make a grunting sound, as if my terribleness had given her a migraine attack. Mr. Pohl would just exhale and tell me to do it again.

  I kept waiting for the good old Berlin sense of humor to break out of these two old people, but either they’d never had it or whatever drove them out of Germany had killed forever their ability to laugh. So for seven endless days I sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table in their ugly apartment, learning to speak berlinerisch, not as I had from my Grandma Olga, with a comfortable 1880s ease, but with a 1940s lower-class seriousness. I did learn some happy Berlin expressions: dufte for “nice” or “great”; klamauk, a word for loud fun or a juicy scandal. But they were drilled into me the way an unfeeling dentist would drill a tooth: without letup or a smile, and with no diverting chitchat.

  Mrs. Pohl had apparently cooked the day before I arrived. It was a big stew, and we ate the grayish, stringy meat at one o’clock every single afternoon. At night, there would be cheese and some pickled cucumbers, and twice, an apple for dessert. And they would never let up: Is the meat good? Obviously, they weren’t interested in the truth. What they wanted was a complete sentence, so I’d say, Yes, I am really enjoying the stew. How do you make it? Does it have a lot of onions? What seasonings do you use?

  Neither of them ever smiled at me, and I couldn’t figure out whether they were just two miserable people or whether the OSS, in one of its typical budget-cutting sprees, had gypped them out of half the money it had originally promised, and they were taking it out on me.

  Then at last another car, a Packard, like the one Edward used, pulled up in front of the house. It drove me not back to Washington, as I’d expected, hoped, but to a military airport outside Baltimore.

  The driver said, “Inside those doors. Ladies’ room on the second floor.” When I went in, a woman with a Scandinavian accent was waiting for me; she was very tall, with brown hair down to her shoulders and long, thin arms dangling from her sleeveless dress.

  She said, “Go into the stall and give me all your clothes, please,” and handed me new ones over the top of the door. Old ones, actually, probably straight off the backs of German refugees: a German brassiere, which was about as graceful as a sling, German cotton stockings, German shoes that made my army boots look stylish, and a German dress. When I came out, she handed me a German valise, which contained a few more items like the ones I was now wearing. “Well,” she said. “Good luck.” Oh, God, I thought, I should get to a phone and make some calls. I’m leaving from here. I have to say goodbye.

  But I just asked, “Where am I going?”

  “To New York.”

  “And from there?” I figured the best I’d get from her was something like: I don’t know, or: I’m not supposed to talk about that.

  But she put her mouth to my ear and said, “Troop ship. England.”

  “And then?” I whispered.

  “And then, to the place where you belong.”

  21

  “Say as little as possible,” Konrad Friedrichs muttered. We walked out of the small white building onto a runway in the Lisbon airport, toward the biggest plane I’d ever seen. “Your accent is not what it should be.”

  “Do I sound American?” I asked. I had to hustle to keep up with him. He was tall, over six feet, and took long, determined strides. Although he must have been at least sixty, he held himself as if someone had just yelled: Achtung!

  “No. You sound odd, as if you had a rare type of speech impediment.” I was about to chuckle, when I realized nothing Herr Friedrichs said was intended to be humorous. “That is why you have been sent in as a menial. If there are any questions about your pronunciation, people will assume you are slow-witted.”

  It’s a measure of how dazed I was that I had even considered the possibility of chuckling. I’d been across the ocean on a troop ship where I had to lock myself in a tiny state-room and have my meals left on trays outside my door so no one could see me. After that came three days in a metal hut with the rain beating down on it at an Army Air Forces base in England, where the head OSS guy, who looked like Al Capone, tried to convince me that no one they’d sent over had ever refused to go to parachute school and that, don’t worry, when the time came no one would force me to jump if I didn’t want to. I said no. I remembered Edward being angry once about the number of agents killed making blind jumps into enemy territory. It wasn’t so much that they were getting shot; it was that the partisans couldn’t get their lights to where they were supposed to be half the time, so the OSS agents wound up impaled on trees, or drowned, or just plain pulverized.

  After three days of being screamed at for being a coward, they sent me to a rooming house outside London, where I studied maps and memorized a safe address where I could go only in a life-or-death situation, although they admitted—after I asked them—that the Gestapo’s track record being what it was, “safe” was maybe a slight exaggeration. Then I learned my peril code. If I was captured and forced to send a message, I was to use the word “simply” in it. Like if there was a noose around my neck and a gun in my mouth, I should write: Don’t worry. I’m simply fine, or: The weather is simply lovely. Not that they would come and save me; they’d just know not to believe anything in the message.

  They changed my name to Lina Albrecht. They told me I had to wear my hair in braids and pin them up; it was apparently the last word in Aryan elegance. They gave me my false identity papers
and flew me from the air force base to beautiful, balmy, neutral Lisbon.

  “What if someone asks me a direct question?” I asked Konrad as we hurried toward the plane. “Should I talk?”

  “Obviously.”

  “But this is not the time for idle chatter,” I observed. To put it mildly. About twenty feet ahead of us was the giant German plane, a Messerschmitt with six propellers—complete with an Iron Cross insignia on its side and a swastika on its tail. And talk about Achtung: a Luftwaffe officer, probably the pilot, whose posture made Herr Friedrichs look like a sloucher, stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for us.

  There was a reason for this courtesy; Konrad Friedrichs was no slouch. He’d been working in the German foreign office since 1907, and was their ranking expert on Spain and Portugal. He was also a fervent anti-Nazi and Norman Weekes’s most highly placed spy. Until he sat beside me in the waiting room in the airport, all I’d known was that code name Rex—Norman’s famous Rex—would find me. In a voice just loud enough for the people nearest us to hear, he said, My dear Lina. I am pleased you have decided to return with me. Then he put his head close to mine and said, Konrad Friedrichs. Foreign office. You know you are coming back to Berlin as my cook? I nodded. Smile at me, he ordered. I smiled. He went on: It is possible that people will assume you are also my mistress. Do nothing to discourage this supposition.

  We were almost at the plane. “Keep your eyes down,” he whispered; they were. “No friendly glances. No hellos. You are a servant.”

  The pilot clicked his heels together and gave the stiff Heil Hitler salute as we reached the plane. A terrible chill went up my back. I’d seen that gesture so often in newsreels that it seemed like part of a movie: something unreal, accompanied by popcorn. But now it was happening. Herr Friedrichs saluted back and, I sensed, held his breath for a moment. But I had been trained. The salute was not meant for me. Like an obedient German, I did precisely what was expected of me: held back, let my employer precede me up the stairs and followed, head down, suitcase in hand.