by Susan Isaacs
“Aren’t you a little nervous about walking down the street with champagne and half a calf?” I asked. “The penalties for dealing in black market goods—”
“Lina,” she said, unwrapping the meat, “I am a trusted employee of the Abwehr. My father’s family has been eating fine veal since before the Hundred Years’ War. And my mother, who is very beautiful and very charming, was a great actress. She’s retired now, but in the late twenties and thirties she was a favorite of our Führer, and his affection for her has never diminished. Should I feel afraid?”
“No,” I answered her. “I guess you should feel pretty good.”
Margarete turned to me. Her hand came out of the shopping bag, and she was holding a bunch of parsley as if it was a delicate bouquet. “I will feel very good,” she said quietly, “when every single goddamned Nazi is dead.”
All the men on the streets of Berlin were in uniform. Those few who weren’t were either doomed or people to be afraid of; you knew instinctively to avoid both. The women were more like me, in dreary coats of Zellwolle, a fake material that from a distance looked like wool but up close looked like a scouring pad. It did nothing to keep you warm.
Now and then, one of the wives or mistresses of men in power would glide by, wrapped in a cloud of French perfume and yards of fur; the invasions of France and Scandinavia had done wonders for the women of the powerful. In London I’d heard that Goebbels was trying to get them to play down their privilege; he’d even put an end to their morning horseback rides in the Tiergarten, the park in the center of Berlin. He didn’t want the masses to be resentful. Ha. One look at Margarete’s cashmere sweater collection and her fox coat and her gold earrings in those days of standing on line for an hour and a half just to buy a turnip should have caused a riot of resentment. But either the Nazis’ women were the German equivalent of movie stars—they lived sumptuous lives on everybody’s behalf—or people were too terrified to show their resentment.
I was perpetually terrified, but who—even the most innocent—would not be? The second time I left Herr Friedrichs’s house, I’d seen three Gestapo men beating up a middle-aged man outside a bakery. The man’s head was in the gutter, his body on the sidewalk; one of them stamped his boot down, again and again, on the man’s stomach, and his head jerked with every blow, The other two just said, “Move along,” to the people on the street, mechanically, because not a single person stopped or even slowed down. Maybe no one was innocent.
I’d finally gone outside, seven days after I arrived in Berlin. All my papers were in order—my passport, my workbook and my ration card. The OSS may have sent men parachuting in the dark and going splat onto concrete high-ways, but everyone said they were great with documents. I hoped so. Herr Friedrichs had looked at all three of them, as well as the card I didn’t have to carry, my Ahnenpass, my ancestry passport, which proved Lina Albrecht’s Aryan descent. All he said was, Adequate. They had to be more than adequate, because there could be an identity check anywhere, anytime. It was all up to the discretion—and the mood—of the Gestapo.
The picture on my passport had been taken in England. It showed me in three-quarters profile, so if you looked close, you could really get a good idea of how stupid-looking the braids were and how washed out I looked without any makeup. Or maybe I’d just gone pale that day because right before they took the photograph, they put my right and left index fingerprints on the card. I remember I’d gotten that numb feeling again when I saw the partially filled out passport and pictured that if it had been made out to Linda Voss instead of Lina Albrecht, there would be a giant “J” stamped on the left side.
But dead Jews don’t need identity cards. One of the OSS men in the boarding house in London had mentioned, quite casually, that there were still about forty thousand Jews in Berlin, but then he’d added, No. Wait a second. Probably a lot less by now. They’re in the middle of another roundup. More deportations and the usual deaths. I’d asked, What do you mean by, usual? And he’d answered, Suicides. The ones from Eastern Europe don’t know what’s going to happen to them. The ones in Berlin are starting to understand.
I had to go to the fish store that first day. And even though I traced and retraced the seven blocks on the map and in my mind, the walk never seemed to end. Good German that Lina was, she kept her eyes down and minded her own business, but I worried that something in my stride, something in the way I carried my pocketbook, something in the way I looked at a traffic signal, would give away that I was an American.
My heart pounded so hard I could hear it inside my ears. I was going to meet my contact. Once I became a chef, I’d be giving all my information to the fish man. Now I was just going to introduce myself, to say, “Good morning. I hope the walleyed pike is not as bony as it was last Thursday.”
I tried to ease the banging of my heart by telling myself that the OSS had chosen a reliable and cautious member of the resistance for me to report to, and the chances of a Gestapo agent hiding under the halibut were small. But as I waited to cross the street, I froze. I knew that whether I waited one second or twenty minutes, I could not take another step forward, and that inevitably, shamefully, I’d lose control and go running back to Rex’s—giving away my hysteria, my foreignness, my guilt just by the mere fact of running.
But then Edward Leland stopped me. I stood there on that corner and said to myself, Edward has gone to ground in Denmark and in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in Rumania, and he can’t even speak the language. Does his heart ever beat like this? Does he ever want to turn and run?
And then I realized how well I’d gotten to know the man I’d worked for, because suddenly I understood that yes, something in him probably wanted to run back to whatever seaport he’d entered in Poland, screaming his head off. I crossed the street and asked myself, Why didn’t he run? What made him keep going?
I couldn’t figure out the answer, but it was as if Edward was standing next to me. I could hear his voice, deep, sure, soothing: Do it now, I could suddenly hear him say. Think about it later.
So I just wrapped my ugly brown Zellwolle coat tighter around me and walked fast, so Rolf Vogel, fishmonger, would not run out of walleyed pike before I got to the store.
22
“There’s an old berlinersch expression,” I said. “‘Eine jute jebratene Jans is eine jute Jabe Jottes.’” That was one of the nine hundred forty-two sayings that the Pohls, the awful old couple in Baltimore, had taught me.
Margarete von Eberstein, the sleeves of her red silk blouse rolled up, was showing me how to stuff the neck of a goose with a forcemeat of ground liver, pork and herbs. “‘A good roast goose is a good gift of God,’” she repeated, smiling, as she tried out my accent. She put the neck into my hands and remarked, “Here. The good gift of God needs more stuffing.”
By the end of my third week in Berlin, Margarete had come to the house at least ten different times, both on weekends and after work at the Abwehr, where she was a translator. I almost laughed when she told me that: She could get along all right in French and Italian, she explained, but her specialty was English. Here we were, becoming friends, and I had to fight all my instincts and suppress the urge to turn to her and say—in English: Squishing all this slimy stuff into a goose neck is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had to do!
After all the hours I’d spent with Margarete, I could predict her reaction. Her mouth would drop and she’d stare at me, and then all of a sudden she’d burst into laughter. Not that ho-ho-ho, typical overjolly German guffaw, but the sort of laugh that’s described in books as musical.
The odds on our ever becoming friends were about as great as my becoming great buddies with one of Nan’s Smith College socialites: nil, or pretty close to it. But just as politics makes strange bedfellows, war makes peculiar friendships. We were thrown together by a single common denominator: We both hated Nazism. Of course, so did Herr Friedrichs, and that certainly didn’t make him my pal. But Margarete and I discovered that we had a lot
in common. Not that I shared her love of literature or her passion for cooking; how much did I have to say to a woman who got all flushed with pleasure at the mention of wild mushrooms? And if she’d known about it, she definitely wouldn’t have shared my appreciation or obsession or whatever it was with the movies; I’d have been willing to bet that if someone had shown her a picture of Cary Grant, she would have had absolutely no idea who he was.
But what we did share, I guess, was a hatred of grimness. Right from that first Saturday afternoon, we’d sensed a quality in each other; fun.
What bothered me was that the more fun we had together, the less fun—if you can call it that—I was having perpetuating all the lies of my cover story. She believed I was Lina Albrecht, who was twenty-eight years old and the daughter of a Berlin butcher and a housewife (both dead), who had married a man twenty-two years older, a man who worked as majordomo in the household of an Austrian playboy who lived in Portugal, and that my husband had died of a kidney disease eighteen months before.
I’d hinted that the playboy had allowed me to stay on in his house, as his cook. Margarete got the impression (and getting this impression across was as much a part of my cover story as the part I actually spoke about) that the playboy had kept me around for more than my Eintopf. And she got the impression that just as the playboy was tiring of me, along came his cousin, Konrad Friedrichs, who saw in me not only what his cousin did, but also a truly new face…and someone he could use for his own political purposes.
Margarete trussed the goose once, and then had me do it. It took me six tries, and in comparison to hers, my results looked pathetic. “What a mess!” I said.
“Lina…” she began.
“What?”
“What do you think of people who intrude upon the most private part of your life?” Margarete asked.
I lifted the goose and put it into the roaster. “What do you want to know?” I responded.
“Are you in love with Konrad?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Why is it good? Because elderly foreign office officials don’t marry young—well, sort of young—household employees?”
“That’s part of the reason,” she said. “But also…I would feel better if I knew that what you are doing…you are doing out of deep conviction. Because if you do it out of love, Lina, if you go wherever you are going to please a man, then you surely won’t survive. It takes a hard edge. I think—no, I know I have it. I don’t know if you do. You seem so sweet, so vulnerable. Losing your husband…”
As Margarete spoke, I immediately thought of John, but I forced that picture out of my mind and replaced it with the make-believe Johannes Albrecht. Outside London, at the rooming house, the OSS people had shown me photographs of a man in his early fifties, heavyset, with a hard, bulldog face, and said, This is your late husband. You can’t do better? I’d demanded. Come on, they’d said, and kept me up till three one morning telling them details about my “marriage.” I told them everything, how “Johannes” liked his socks folded, not rolled, and how different he had become about sex after the first year of our nine-year marriage.
“Do you miss your husband?” she asked.
“No.” I smiled a little and added, “Sorry.”
“Was he bad to you? Did he beat you?”
“Margarete, your view of reality is not exactly realistic. Ordinary, working-class husbands do not routinely get drunk and beat their wives.”
“They obviously lack a sense of the grand gesture. I am disappointed.”
“I’ll disappoint you some more. Ordinary wives do not automatically have twenty children and commit suicide by drowning themselves in a vat of cabbage.”
“I never thought that.” She cocked her head to the side. “But it is a magnificent image. I almost wish it were true. Not so anyone would actually suffer. But it’s so magnificently German: so prosaic, so stoic. Now tell me, why don’t you miss him? Did you ever love him?”
“No. I was fond of him, in the beginning. But at that time in my life, I had no one else to be fond of. I was an only child, and my father had died when I was ten, and then, when I was seventeen, my mother died. And two months later there was Johannes, on his holiday, visiting his brother, who lived in our building. Now that I think about it, he was probably looking for a wife. I guess he was tired of…the sort of women he could meet in Lisbon.”
“Prostitutes?”
“I suppose so.”
“Did you like living in Lisbon?”
“No.” I put the goose into the oven. Margarete had preheated it. “We lived in a villa by the sea. It sounds very romantic, but it was just isolated. And Johannes didn’t let me go anyplace alone.”
“Was he jealous?”
“No. There was too much work to be done. Polishing silver, dusting books, keeping inventory of linen. He didn’t trust the local girls to do it, and now that he had a wife, he was free of those chores. I suppose he thought if I caught the morning bus to Lisbon and spent a lovely, interesting day, that I’d want to go the next day, and the next.”
“Do you speak Portuguese?”
“No. The man whose house we lived in—”
“The Austrian?”
“Yes. He only wanted German spoken in the house. Why he was so insistent upon that when it had been his choice to move out of Austria and into Portugal, I’ll never know.”
“So you’ve never been in love, Lina?”
“Well…” I remembered the OSS photos of the mythical Austrian playboy. A face that could have been on the cover of a Propaganda Ministry leaflet on “The Greatness of the Aryan.” Except for the jutting chin, the man in the picture had looked uncomfortably like John.
“Oh! You were in love with the Austrian!” Her eyes brightened.
“Margarete, my life isn’t a fairy tale. I knew it wasn’t…mutual. And I knew it would only be for a short time, and that there wouldn’t be a happily ever after.”
“Was it worth it?”
“I guess so. I mean, I’m not like you. I don’t have many opportunities to meet wealthy, educated, exciting men.”
“He was very exciting?”
I looked her straight in the eye. “Yes. Exciting where it mattered most.”
“Oh, my!” Margarete breathed. She took the knives, spoons and plates we’d been using and took them over to the sink. Suddenly she wheeled around. “Everyone thinks I’m a woman of the world, but I’ve never had anything like that.”
“You’ll have it,” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ve walked around the garden, so to speak, many, many times. And all I’ve met is…many boring men. Boring where it mattered most.”
“I don’t think…excitement happens that often. It’s chemistry. I really believe that. You can be fond of someone. Like at the beginning, I was awfully fond of Johannes. Good, steady old Johannes. But even if I’d loved him…when we were together, well, there just wasn’t any chemistry.”
“Did you love this playboy?”
“No. He…he didn’t have a good character, and I think you have to admire a man to really love him. He was very rich, but he never worked a day in his life. He existed only to enjoy what he was born with.”
“He sounds like my father.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean…”
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “That’s all right. My father wasn’t…isn’t a playboy. He’s quite faithful to my mother, although the reverse, I believe, is not the case. But he’s a man who rides and hunts and enjoys the fruits of his wealth, his inherited wealth, and who—” She broke off.
“What?”
“My father will do anything and everything to preserve the status quo. In 1932, there was a group of noblemen, the DAG, who endorsed Hitler. My father was one of its leaders. Hitler is anti-Communist, he said, and the National Socialists stand for a Germany that we all stand for. What he meant was a Germany where the aristocracy will be treated like proper aristocrats.”
“When did he b
ecome disillusioned?” I asked.
“He didn’t. If Hitler doesn’t turn on you, he can be a loyal and generous friend.” Her face grew somber. “The Baron von Eberstein has prospered.”
“What about your mother?”
“You must be joking, Lina. My mother is an actress. Hitler was her admirer. He thought her brilliant. Do you think she could find anything sinister or immoral in such a man—or in the movement he led? No. To the contrary. My mother finds Hitler, finds Nazism, ‘brilliant’ also.”
“Then how did you come to where you are?”
“I suppose because my parents ignored me. So I was free to look at their lives, look at their choices, and then form my own opinions.”
The baron, through luck and his ties to the Nazis, had managed to keep hold of his money and his land. There were moments, when Margarete described her father sauntering out of the woods after a morning’s hunting, his black rifle slung over his shoulder, that he sounded like a handsome, romantic and exciting figure: a baron but, in his daughter’s eyes, something of a prince. A remote prince, though, and a prince who brought a lot of brutal, loud-mouth peasants back to the castle with him.
Margarete’s mother visited her husband’s estate at Christmas, Easter and for a month in the summer, but she kept her own house in Berlin. She was one of the great actresses of her day, and she performed not only in German but in English and French as well. Goethe, Shakespeare, Molière. She could do them all. That she’d had a daughter was a fact she frequently forgot. Margarete said her mother came home the summer she was ten and kept calling her “Pretty girl,” as if she’d forgotten her name. Margarete said, She could memorize all of Faust and Antony and Cleopatra, but she couldn’t quite remember whether I was Margarete or Margot.